Director, Product Software Engineering | Platform Engineering and Architecture
Wolters Kluwer
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Benefits offered by this job
Job summary
Qualifications
- Minimum 9+ years of experience in product software engineering or platform/SRE leadership roles.
- People management experience is required.
- Experience in matrixed environments is essential.
Responsibilities
- Provide strategic leadership, vision, and roadmaps for developer enablement.
- Lead the Developer Enablement team for releasing container‑based software.
- Establish site reliability practices aligned with product objectives.
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
As a Director in Software Engineering, you will provide comprehensive leadership to senior managers and high‑level professionals. You will have primary responsibility for the performance and results within your area, ensuring that all software engineering activities align with business strategies. Your role is crucial for steering the direction of major projects and technological advancements that will drive the company forward.
We are seeking a “full‑stack” engineering Director to hire and lead a team that will be responsible for providing leadership to over 600 engineers on infrastructure as code, container deployment platforms, CI/CD, and applications required for operational management. Additionally, the Director will be engaged on incidents for triage and resolution, drive automation, and continuously improve developer enablement and infrastructure platforms, accelerating product delivery and operational excellence across Kubernetes‑based environments. The ideal candidate will guide the definition, execution, and governance of release processes and platform capabilities; operate with broad latitude and accountability for outcomes aligned to divisional strategy. Work is performed without appreciable direction and is evaluated on execution against defined plans and strategy, with measurable impact on divisional results.
- Reports To: VP of Platform Engineering & Architecture
- Supervises: Senior managers, managers, and high‑level professionals across developer enablement, platform engineering, and SRE functions.
- Provide strategic leadership, vision, and roadmaps for developer enablement and infrastructure engineering in a highly matrixed organization; ensure alignment with business objectives and partner teams.
- Establish clear objectives, success measures, and investment priorities for the platform, balancing reliability, velocity, cost, and risk.
- Model inclusive collaboration and effective communication with senior management, peers, and subordinates to drive alignment and execution.
- Drive adoption of AI Developer Tools to drive speed to market and reduce developer friction.
- Lead the Developer Enablement team that owns the platform for releasing container‑based software to Kubernetes (K8s); define platform SLAs/SLOs, roadmaps, and service catalog.
- Own Akuity/Argo CD (GitOps) administration and lifecycle; define guardrails, RBAC, multi‑cluster promotion strategies, and drift detection/rollback practices.
- Maintain and evolve Open Application Model (OAM) templates, golden paths, and paved‑road workflows to standardize microservice onboarding and runtime config.
- Govern end‑to‑end container release processes (policy, controls, approvals, and tooling), including promotion workflows, artifact provenance (SBOM/SLSA), and progressive delivery (blue/green, canary).
- Integrate and maintain Developer Enablement metrics reporting into central data lake environments.
- Staff, train, and mature a new team that becomes the core of infrastructure development and SRE; define role architecture, hiring profiles, onboarding plans, and growth paths.
- Deliver platform capabilities as products (self‑service, APIs, documentation, runbooks), enabling product teams to design, provision, and operate infrastructure consistently.
- Train and assist engineering teams with infrastructure design and deployment (networking, storage, data, security, observability), while performing hands‑on engineering to ensure deployments and operations are fully automated (IaC, GitOps, policy‑as‑code, CI/CD).
- Establish site reliability practices—SLO/SLI, error budgets, incident management, post‑incident reviews, and capacity/performance engineering—aligned with product objectives.
- Define release governance and change management controls (e.g., segregation of duties, approval workflows, audit trails) integrated into platform tooling, partner with Security, Risk, and Compliance for continuous assurance.
- Ensure adherence to quality standards and secure‑by‑design practices across the software supply chain.
Bachelor’s Degree in a related field and relevant experience in product software engineering.
- Minimum 9+ years of relevant experience in product software engineering or platform/SRE leadership roles.
- People management experience.
- Experience in matrixed environments.
- Knowledge and interest in AI.
- Technical competence in platform engineering and architecture.
- Platform engineering for Kubernetes at scale (multi‑cluster/multi‑region), GitOps (Argo CD/Akuity), service meshes, secrets management.
- Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform/Pulumi), policy‑as‑code (OPA/Gatekeeper), progressive delivery (Argo Rollouts/Flagger).
- CI/CD at enterprise scale (artifact provenance, SBOM/SLSA), container security, and supply chain controls.
- Observability platforms (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerts) and incident management practices.
- Coaching product teams; operating in a matrixed enterprise with strong stakeholder management.
- Technical/Operational Skills.
- DevOps & Agile delivery; automation and continuous delivery at scale.
- Cloud computing (Azure/AWS/GCP) and modern application architectures; API‑first enablement.
- Automation & Frameworks for standardized delivery and code manageability across teams.
- Application Security and secure SDLC; architectural patterns for scalable, resilient systems.
- Financial/Budget Management for platform services and shared‑service cost models that include understanding of how to use technology to drive cost reductions while increasing value delivery. This requires budget, technical and operational competencies.
- Experience in both use of AI coding tools personally and in driving adoption of those in developer teams.
- Accountability; Judgement & Decision‑Making; Business Acumen to drive measurable outcomes.
- Inclusive Collaboration; Inspiration & Alignment; Courage to take smart risks that enable innovation.
- People Management: delegation, coaching, performance management, and talent development.
- Velocity & Flow: Lead time for change; deployment frequency; PR cycle time (open‑to‑merge).
- Reliability: Service SLO attainment; MTTI/MTTR; change failure rate.
- Adoption & Self‑Service: of services on Gantry; % workloads on paved paths/OAM templates; % infra as code.
- Quality & Security: Policy compliance rate; supply‑chain attestations; pipeline pass rate; vulnerability MTTR.
- Experience & Enablement: Developer NPS; onboarding time to first deploy; “friction index” trend.
- Overall infrastructure cost reduction while increasing all of the above.
Travel: 20%
A comprehensive benefits package that begins your first day of employment. Full details of our benefits are available at https://www.mywolterskluwerbenefits.com/index.html
Wolters Kluwer offers great benefits and programs to help meet your needs and balance your work and personal life, including Medical, Dental, & Vision Plans, 401(k), FSA/HSA, Commuter Benefits, Tuition Assistance Plan, Vacation and Sick Time, and Paid Parental Leave.
Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.
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