Sr. Director, Software Engineering

Lifetouch; Eden Prairie (MN); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Lifetouch, part of the Shutterfly family, seeks a Senior Director of Engineering in Eden Prairie, MN, onsite to lead software development, quality engineering, and the operating model for fast, reliable delivery.

You will guide customer-facing and internal platforms, mentor managers, and drive Agile practices, automation, and AI-enabled development while aligning roadmaps with business goals through partner collaboration.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience.
• 5+ years leading managers and multi-team engineering organizations.
• Experience leading organizations of 50+ engineers.
• Experience leading offshore teams (India preferred).

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering teams supporting customer-facing products, business applications, integrations, shared services, and platform operations.
• Build, develop, and mentor engineering managers, technical leaders, and senior engineers while driving succession planning and career development.
• Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, inclusion, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Align organizational structure, skills, capacity, and partner resources with business priorities.
• Communicate commitments, risks, tradeoffs, and outcomes to executive leadership while building high-performing teams.
• Own engineering KPIs, scorecards, and dashboards focused on quality, throughput, predictability, reliability, and business outcomes.

Skills

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

People management

Strategic planning

Communication to executives

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

DevOps practices

Observability

Automation testing

Offshore partner management

Job description

At Lifetouch (part of the Shutterfly family of brands), we believe there is extraordinary power in the self-expression. Built on the tradition of “Picture Day”, Lifetouch has captured the unique personalities of children and families for more than 90 years.

*This role is based in our Eden Prairie, MN office and requires regular onsite collaboration.

Lifetouch is seeking a results-oriented Senior Director of Engineering to lead software development, quality engineering, and the operating model that enables teams to deliver high-quality software quickly, predictably, and efficiently. This leader will combine strong people leadership with disciplined engineering operations and pragmatic Agile practices across customer-facing and internal platforms.

The role is accountable for translating business and product priorities into executable plans, improving delivery flow, strengthening engineering standards, and ensuring reliable day-to-day operations. The Senior Director will help Lifetouch modernize its engineering practices, expand automation and AI-assisted development, improve eCommerce and customer experiences, and increase product development capacity while supporting a complex portfolio of business-critical systems.

Primary Mission: Build an engineering organization that delivers meaningful business outcomes with speed, quality, accountability, and operational discipline.

Key Responsibilities:

Engineering Leadership

• Lead engineering teams supporting customer-facing products, business applications, integrations, shared services, and platform operations.
• Build, develop, and mentor engineering managers, technical leaders, and senior engineers while driving succession planning and career development.
• Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, inclusion, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Align organizational structure, skills, capacity, and partner resources with business priorities.
• Serve as the operational leader for Engineering, overseeing systems, processes, metrics, and a team of 6-10 direct reports, including Engineering Managers and QE, DBA, and L2 Support leaders.
• Communicate commitments, risks, tradeoffs, and outcomes to executive leadership while building high-performing teams.

Strategic Planning & Execution:

• Lead annual and quarterly planning, including capacity planning, resource allocation, dependency management, and roadmap execution.
• Establish operating mechanisms and accountability frameworks that provide visibility into performance, risks, organizational health, and delivery outcomes.
• Partner closely with Product Management to align engineering investments with company priorities.

Operational Excellence & Delivery:

• Own engineering KPIs, scorecards, and dashboards focused on quality, throughput, predictability, reliability, and business outcomes.
• Drive delivery performance, release predictability, and continuous improvement of key metrics, including Lead Time, Cycle Time, WIP, MTTR, and roadmap attainment.
• Proactively identify and mitigate risks, dependencies, and execution challenges.
• Lead distributed teams and strategic partners to maximize productivity, quality, and cost effectiveness.
• Partner across Network Engineering, Systems Engineering, Security, Operations, Infrastructure, SRE, Support, Finance, and Product teams to ensure platform reliability, seasonal readiness, and operational success.
• Lead incident management, operational reviews, post-incident learning, and efforts to improve resiliency, scalability, performance, monitoring, and automation.

Agile & Engineering Excellence:

• Establish and champion Agile delivery best practices, including planning, backlog management, estimation, retrospectives, and release management.
• Strengthen software engineering standards, observability, security, operational readiness, developer experience, and automation.
• Partner with Quality Engineering to expand automated testing and reduce manual effort.
• Promote continuous improvement, learning, experimentation, and outcome-based delivery.

AI-Enabled Engineering:

• Drive practical adoption of AI to improve software development, defect detection, root cause analysis, workflow automation, knowledge management, documentation, and developer productivity.
• Ensure AI solutions increase throughput, quality, and efficiency while maintaining appropriate governance and security standards.

Cross-Functional Leadership:

• Partner with Product, UX, Architecture, Data, Security, Operations, Customer Experience, and Finance leaders.
• Facilitate decisions involving scope, timing, quality, cost, and risk.
• Provide concise executive communications and contribute to strategic planning and organizational transformation initiatives.

Qualifications:

Leadership Experience:

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading managers and multi-team engineering organizations.
• Experience leading organizations of 50+ engineers through engineering managers.
• Proven success improving engineering delivery performance, organizational effectiveness, and leading offshore teams (India preferred).

Technical Expertise Experience with:

• Modern software development practices
• Agile methodologies
• Cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
• DevOps and CI/CD
• Quality engineering and test automation
• Reliability engineering and operational support
• Engineering productivity measurement
• Distributed team leadership
• Vendor and offshore partner management

Supporting a diverse and inclusive workforce is important to Shutterfly not only because it directly reflects our value of Embracing our Differences, but also because it’s the right thing to do for our business and for our people. We welcome all applicants and evaluate them based on their qualifications. Learn more about our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on our Career Site.

This position will accept applications on an ongoing basis until filled.