Director Software Engineering

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

The Investment Growth value stream powers user engagement, digital account opening, asset movement, and advisor-client scheduling experiences across our wealth management platform. These capabilities directly impact conversion, onboarding, funding, and long-term client retention.

We are seeking a transformational Director of Engineering to lead multiple product-aligned engineering teams in India. This leader will scale engineering excellence across cloud-native Java platforms, elevate Agile and release maturity, and strengthen Site Reliability Engineering discipline — while delivering secure, compliant financial systems at scale.

This role blends strategic leadership, operational rigor, and technical depth. You will lead managers and engineering teams, deliver high-priority enterprise initiatives, and elevate execution maturity across the value stream.

Key Responsibilities

Organizational Leadership

• Lead multiple engineering teams, including managing managers
• Build and scale a high-performing engineering organization in India
• Develop technical bench strength and succession plans
• Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, and engineering excellence
  
  

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Define and execute technical strategy aligned to business growth objectives
• Drive cloud-native architecture strategy across Java/Spring Boot microservices
• Guide modernization of legacy systems toward event-driven, resilient architectures
• Ensure scalable, secure, highly available system designs
• Oversee complex third-party and vendor integrations
• Partner closely with Product, Architecture, Risk, and Compliance stakeholders
  
  

Agile Maturity & Delivery Excellence

• Elevate Agile execution maturity across multiple teams
• Improve planning discipline, estimation quality, and cross-team dependency management
• Strengthen “definition of done,” quality gates, and engineering standards
• Drive measurable improvements in delivery predictability and throughput
  
  

Site Reliability Engineering & Operational Resilience

• Build and mature Site Reliability Engineering practices
• Improve observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Drive improvements in reliability, uptime, MTTR, and production stability
• Establish SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets appropriate for financial systems
• Embed reliability engineering into development lifecycle practices
  
  

Operational Accountability

• Own end-to-end engineering outcomes across roadmap delivery and production health
• Balance innovation and experimentation with regulatory and operational rigor
• Report progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to senior leadership
  
  

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, including significant people management
• Proven experience managing managers and scaling multi-team organizations
• Proven experience partnering across Business, Product, and Architecture to deliver technical solutions that drive business outcomes
• Strong background in financial services, fintech, or wealth management
• Deep experience building and scaling systems on AWS
• Strong technical foundation in Java and distributed architectures
• Demonstrated experience leading complex vendor integrations
• Experience operating in regulated environments with strong security and compliance requirements
• Proven track record improving Agile delivery maturity across multiple teams
• Experience establishing structured release management processes in multi-team environments
• Experience implementing or leading SRE practices, including observability and incident management
• Demonstrated ability to improve engineering performance metrics (e.g., deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR)
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with digital account opening or onboarding systems
• Experience with asset movement systems (ACH, ACAT, journals)
• Experience building experimentation platforms for growth optimization
• Experience leading engineering transformation initiatives in high-growth environments
  
  

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.

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