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