[Hiring] Senior Director, Product Engineering @J.D. Power

Role Description

Leads the Product Engineering organization at JD Power, accountable for the people, practices, and delivery of engineering across our product portfolios. Brought in to align engineering execution across portfolios and establish a durable operating model that scales as the business and product strategy evolve.

As Senior Director of Product Engineering, you will serve as the driving force behind the engineering organization's ability to deliver innovative, scalable, and secure products across multiple portfolios. Your leadership will directly shape the velocity, quality, and strategic direction of engineering teams — accelerating time-to-market while raising the bar on technical excellence and operational resilience.

What You’ll Be Doing in This Role

• Organization and Leadership
  • Manages, levels, and develops the leadership bench across product portfolios.
  • Owns the hiring plan for Product Engineering and partners with Talent Acquisition on sourcing, leveling, and selection.
  • Sets performance expectations, manages out underperformance, and runs calibration across the organization.
  • Defines and communicates the org structure, role definitions, and career paths for engineers and engineering managers.
  • Owns engagement outcomes for the Product Engineering org.
• Delivery and Operating Model
  • Establishes and enforces a consistent engineering operating model across portfolios — planning cadence, delivery commitments, release practices, code review standards, and incident response.
  • Partners with Product leadership on portfolio prioritization, capacity planning, and roadmap commitments.
  • Owns engineering delivery against committed roadmaps and reports progress to executive leadership.
  • Drives continuous improvement on DORA and other metrics for in-scope products.
• Quality, Reliability, and Customer Outcomes
  • Owns the quality and reliability posture of in-scope products in production — including defect rates, customer-impacting incidents, and SLAs.
  • Establishes and reports on a small set of quality and reliability metrics that tie to customer outcomes.
  • Partners with DevOps, Security, and Data Engineering on the shared platform contracts that product engineering depends on.
• Technical Direction
  • Sets technical direction for product engineering in coordination with architecture and peer engineering leaders.
  • Approves significant architecture and technology decisions within the Product Engineering org.
  • Sponsors engineering investments — platform consolidation, modernization, AI-enabled developer workflows — that improve productivity and product quality.
  • Ensures appropriate technical depth at the director level; expects directors to own architectural review for their portfolios.
• Business and Executive Partnership
  • Reports to the hiring manager; serves as a peer to Product, Data, DevOps, and Security leaders.
  • Represents Product Engineering to the executive team, customers, and (when relevant) the board.
  • Owns the Product Engineering budget, including headcount, vendors, and contractors.
  • Communicates clearly and frequently with non-engineering stakeholders on commitments, risks, and trade-offs.
• Decision Authority
  • Approves engineering hires (IC and management) within the approved headcount plan.
  • Final approver on engineering operating model, delivery practices, and quality standards across product portfolios.
  • Approves Product Engineering vendor contracts and tooling decisions up to [$X] without escalation.
  • Sponsor / approver on cross-portfolio architecture decisions originating within Product Engineering.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software engineering, with at least 8 years managing engineers and at least 5 years managing managers.
• Direct experience leading an engineering organization of 75+ people, including a director or sr. director leadership bench.
• Demonstrated turnaround / stabilization experience — has inherited an underperforming or destabilized engineering org and improved delivery, quality, and team health with quantifiable results.
• Track record of shipping data and analytics products at scale — SaaS analytics, insights, data-heavy enterprise products, or similar.
• Has built and enforced a consistent engineering operating model across multiple product lines or business units.
• Strong executive presence; effective communicator with non-engineering stakeholders and executive peers.
• Has hired, leveled, performance-managed, and exited director-level engineering leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in automotive, mobility, insurance, financial services, or comparable data-rich industries.
• Has led an engineering organization through a meaningful technology modernization (cloud, platform, or AI-enabled product capabilities).
• Has integrated AI/ML capabilities into production products, including the operating practices to support them.
• Comfortable operating in a fully distributed organization with engineers across US time zones.

Benefits

• This position has a starting salary range of $225K - $250K USD / $180K - $200K CAD per year.
• An employee’s pay within the range is determined by a number of factors, including relevant skills, education, qualifications, experience, performance, business or organizational needs, and geographic location.