Shelton - Tech Leadership - VP- Engineering

Subway•Shelton, CT

About The Position

The Vice President of Engineering will lead the engineering organization responsible for the franchisee-facing in-restaurant experience, including Point-of-sale, Menu management, Payments, and other critical applications. This leadership role is accountable for the team's output, cost, reliability, and people development. The VP will own technical strategy, the engineering budget, and organizational design for a team of approximately 50 engineers. This is a full-scope leadership position focused on strategic outcomes rather than technical execution, involving budget management, tooling and cloud spend, organizational scaling, and fostering a strong engineering culture.

Requirements

10+ years in engineering leadership.
5+ years managing managers within an organization of comparable scale (40+ engineers, including technical support).
Direct ownership of an engineering budget (headcount, tooling, and cloud spend) with a track record of running it like a P&L.
Experience designing and evolving organizational structure as a team scales.
Direct experience delivering consumer-facing mobile applications.
Hands-on architecture experience on AWS, including serverless and containerized services such as Lambda, Fargate, and DynamoDB.
Experience leading engineering for multi-unit retail or restaurant scale.
Demonstrated track record on the people side of engineering: hiring, developing, and holding a performance bar.
Strong partnership instincts, comfortable operating as a peer to product, marketing, and business stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

React Native experience strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Lead the engineering organization behind the franchisee-facing in-restaurant experience.
Own technical strategy, engineering budget, and organizational design for a team of roughly 50 engineers.
Partner closely with the Chief Technology Officer and product leadership to translate roadmap into results.
Manage the Point-of-sale system, including release quality, performance, and store configuration.
Oversee the menu platform that feeds POS and other channels.
Lead the development of payments applications for both in-store and digital payments.
Manage applications supporting franchisees, such as restaurant management and learning platforms.
Oversee the engineering relationship with digital and corporate systems, including integration, data flow, and roadmap delivery.
Manage cloud infrastructure (AWS and Azure environments), including architecture decisions on scalability, resilience, and cost.
Lead technical support for franchisee-facing properties, including incident response and escalation.
Set technical strategy and architecture direction across franchisee engineering teams.
Own the roadmap-to-delivery pipeline, including planning, prioritization, release management, and tradeoffs.
Make and defend build-vs-buy and platform decisions across the AWS stack.
Own the engineering budget end-to-end, including headcount, tooling, SaaS, and cloud spend.
Negotiate, benchmark, and manage vendor economics for Azure, AWS, and other engineering tools.
Build the annual headcount and budget plan with the Chief Technology Officer and re-forecast as priorities shift.
Track and utilize unit economics (cost per release, cost per engineer, cloud cost per active user) for decision-making.
Design and evolve the organizational structure as the team scales.
Own the full people lifecycle for the organization: hiring, onboarding, career development, performance management, and retention.
Build a culture of ownership and accountability.
Directly manage and develop engineering managers and directors.
Own incident management and on-call processes, including response, escalation, and postmortems.
Set and maintain standards for code review, testing, documentation, and security practices.
Own capacity planning and technical debt management.
Establish and own Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for the digital platform.
Partner with the Chief Technology Officer and product leadership to translate business goals into engineering OKRs.
Represent engineering in executive conversations, including tradeoffs, risk, and cost.