Vice President of Engineering
Ready to build what's next with one of the world's most iconic brands?
The RoleSubway is looking for a Vice President of Engineering to lead the engineering organization behind our guest-facing digital experience - the mobile apps, website, loyalty platform, and the data and integration layers 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 Digital 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 - Mobile: the iOS and Android guest app, built in React Native, including release quality, performance, and app store operations.
- Web: the Subway.com guest experience and its underlying platform.
- Loyalty: the engineering relationship with our loyalty platform (Kobie), including integration, data flow, and roadmap delivery.
- CRM and analytics: engineering support for our CRM and analytics stack, built on Adobe, including instrumentation and data integrity.
- Cloud infrastructure: our AWS environment - Lambda, Fargate, and DynamoDB - including architecture decisions on scalability, resilience, and cost.
- Technical support: the team and processes that keep guest-facing digital properties running, including incident response and escalation.
How You'll Lead Technical Strategy & Delivery - Set technical strategy and architecture direction across mobile, web, loyalty integration, and CRM/analytics engineering - 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 AWS cloud spend - and run it like a P&L, not a request line.
- Own vendor economics for Kobie, Adobe, 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 Digital 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 Digital 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 e-commerce, loyalty, CRM, or analytics platforms, ideally at 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.
