Shelton - Tech Leadership - VP- Engineering

Subway; Shelton, Northern (CT, KY); On-site; USD 260,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Subway seeks a Vice President of Engineering to lead the franchisee-facing in-restaurant tech—POS, menu management, payments, and related applications. You’ll own strategy, budget, and org design for an ~50-person team, partnering with CTO and product to translate roadmaps into tangible results that guests can feel.

This is a full-scope leadership role focused on outcomes, not just delivery, with accountability for cost, reliability, and people development.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in engineering leadership roles, including managing managers.
• Experience delivering consumer-facing mobile apps and retail/restaurant tech.
• Proven budget ownership with P&L mindset.
• Strong partnership with CTO/product leadership.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute technical strategy across franchisee engineering teams.
• Own roadmap-to-delivery, release management, and tradeoffs between features and reliability.
• Manage budgets, tooling, and cloud spend; optimize vendor economics.
• Design org structure and lead engineering managers/directors.
• Drive incident management, code quality, security, and SLOs.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Budget management

People management

React Native

AWS & Azure

Retail tech experience

Tools

AWS

Azure

React Native

CI/CD

Job description

Vice President of Engineering

Ready to build what’s next with one of the world’s most iconic brands?

Why Join Subway?

At Subway, we are not standing still. We are building.

This is a business focused on what matters most: growing franchisee profitability, strengthening our brand and creating long-term value. The people who thrive here are the ones who want to make a real impact.

You will not just do the work. You will shape it.

We move fast. We think like owners. We make decisions that matter. We hold ourselves to a high standard because what we do directly impacts thousands of franchisees around the world.

If you bring energy, accountability and a bias for action, you will fit right in.

We take the work seriously, but we also know the best results come from teams that support each other, celebrate wins and show up ready to build something better every day.

This is your chance to be part of what’s next.

The Role

Subway is looking for a Vice President of Engineering to lead the engineering organization behind our franchisee-facing in-restaurant experience — the Point-of-sale, Menu management, Payments and other applications that connect them. This leader is accountable for the outcomes of that organization: what it ships, what it costs, how reliable it is, and how well it develops and retains its people. You'll own technical strategy, the engineering budget, and org design for a team of roughly 50, partnering closely with the Chief Technology Officer and product leadership to turn roadmap into results guests can feel.

This is a full-scope leadership role, not a technical execution role. Beyond architecture and delivery, you'll run the budget, own the tooling and cloud spend, shape the org chart as it scales, and build the culture and hygiene that separate a strong engineering organization from one that just ships code.

What You'll Own

• POS: deployed in 39 countries, including release quality, performance, and store configuration with peripherals including Kitchen Display Systems, Printers, Cash Drawers.
• Menu Management: the menu platform that feeds POS and other channels.
• Payments applications for both in-store payments and digital payments
• A number of applications that support franchisees including restaurant management, learning platform, etc.
• The engineering relationship with our digital and corporates systems, including integration, data flow, and roadmap delivery.
• Cloud infrastructure: our AWS and Azure environments — Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB, Azure SQL — including architecture decisions on scalability, resilience, and cost.
• Technical support: the team and processes that keep franchisee-facing properties running, including incident response and escalation.

How You'll Lead

Technical Strategy & Delivery

• Set technical strategy and architecture direction across the franchisee engineering teams — and own what it delivers, not just how it's staffed.
• Own the roadmap-to-delivery pipeline: planning, prioritization, release management, and the tradeoffs between feature work, reliability, and technical debt.
• Make and defend build-vs-buy and platform decisions across the AWS stack, balancing scalability, resilience, security, and cost.

Budget & Cost Management

• Own the engineering budget end to end — headcount cost, tooling and SaaS spend, and Azure/AWS cloud spend — and run it like a P&L, not a request line.
• Own vendor economics for Azure, AWS, and other engineering tools: negotiate, benchmark, and cut what isn't earning its cost.
• Build the annual headcount and budget plan with the Chief Technology Officer, and re-forecast it as priorities shift.
• Know your unit economics — cost per release, cost per engineer, cloud cost per active user — and use them to make decisions, not just report them.

People, Culture & Org Design

• Design and evolve the org structure as the team scales — spans of control, management layers, when to split or merge teams — rather than defaulting to the structure you inherit.
• Own the full people lifecycle for your organization: hiring, onboarding, career development and promotion, performance management, and retention of your best people.
• Build a culture of ownership and accountability, where engineers and managers own outcomes rather than tickets, and problems surface early rather than late.
• Directly manage and develop your engineering managers and directors; own their growth and the health of their teams.

Engineering Practices & Reliability

• Own incident management and on-call: response, escalation, postmortems, and the follow-through that prevents repeat incidents.
• Set and hold the bar on code review, testing, documentation, and security practices across the organization.
• Own capacity planning and technical debt — make the tradeoff between roadmap and system health explicit and defensible, rather than letting debt accumulate by default.
• Establish the SLAs/SLOs that matter for a guest-facing digital platform, and own the outcome when they're missed.

Executive Partnership

• Partner with the Chief Technology Officer and product leadership to translate business goals into engineering OKRs, and report against them in business terms, not activity terms.
• Represent engineering in executive conversations — including tradeoffs, risk, and cost — with the same rigor you'd expect from a peer running a P&L.

What You Bring

• 10+ years in engineering leadership, including 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 rather than a cost center.
• Experience designing and evolving org structure as a team scales, not just operating within a structure someone else built.
• Direct experience delivering consumer-facing mobile applications; React Native experience strongly preferred.
• 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.
• A demonstrated track record on the people side of engineering — hiring, developing, and holding a performance bar, including making the hard calls when someone isn't meeting it.
• Strong partnership instincts — comfortable operating as a peer to product, marketing, and business stakeholders, and defending engineering's cost and priorities in those conversations.