Associate Director, Engineering & Platform Product

Key Accountabilities

• Engineering team leadership — primary, approx. 60%:
  • Provide direct people leadership for assigned engineering teams: hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development.
  • Hold delivery accountability for team commitments, quality, and operational health.
  • Partner with senior engineering leaders on shared staffing decisions, mobilizing talent across platform initiatives based on business need and technical fit.
  • Maintain clear administrative reporting lines while enabling flexible project assignment.
  • Contribute to development plans for emerging talent identified in the succession model.
  • Drive efficiency across the engineering and product workflow by identifying, evaluating, and scaling the responsible use of AI tools — raising throughput and quality without increasing headcount, establishing standards for appropriate and secure use, and building team capability so adoption holds.
• Platform product management — added accountability, approx. 40%:
  • Own and maintain the product backlog for the Platform engineering teams, including intake, refinement, and prioritization.
  • Translate business objectives into a sequenced Product roadmap with clear outcomes and acceptance criteria.
  • Serve as the single point of accountability between Platform business stakeholders and engineering delivery.
  • Define and report on product success measures; drive trade-off decisions on scope, sequence, and technical investment.
  • Represent Platform priorities in cross-organizational capacity and staffing discussions.

General Accountabilities

• This role maps to People Manager 1b in the OMF Technology job architecture.
• The accountabilities below are the firm’s standard expectations at that level and apply in addition to the role-specific accountabilities above.
• This role is responsible for leading a team within a department and is accountable for that team’s staffing, resourcing, talent development and budget.
• This role interfaces with the business on topics related to delivery.
• Ownership and autonomy — Leads a team of varying levels and is accountable for decision-making of daily activities, ensuring team execution and removing blockers.
• Produces accurate estimates and provides coaching to team members.
• Communication — Can deliver tough messages, handle disagreement, and address difficult questions to a non-managerial audience with back-up support from a more senior manager — effective downward communication skills.
• Adaptability, agility, innovation — Capable of leading a team through unfamiliar situations. Serves as change champion for new initiatives. Learns quickly when faced with new problems in own area of work; understands and synthesizes more complex, broader problems. Sometimes proactively experiments to find solutions; tolerates uncertainty. Usually views own and others’ successes and mistakes as learning opportunities.
• Problem-solving — Aligns skill sets appropriately to the problem to enable better problem solving. Helps define problems in collaboration with other stakeholders before moving into solution-generation. Identifies possible pitfalls in various solutions.
• Teamwork and collaboration — Works with the team to set short-range goals; provides direction and responsibilities. Tries to match team members’ skills and interests to work. Tracks work status, addresses issues, and provides guidance.
• Demonstrating leadership — Guides and mentors team members by providing feedback and coaching, especially during challenging situations. Encourages people to challenge themselves and helps others stretch their capabilities.

Qualifications

• Required:
  • Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams as a people manager, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
  • Track record of delivery accountability for team commitments, quality, and operational health.
  • Experience owning or materially shaping a prioritized backlog or roadmap, including intake and refinement.
  • Ability to translate business objectives into sequenced work with clear outcomes and acceptance criteria.
  • Proven effectiveness as a single point of accountability between business stakeholders and engineering delivery.
  • Evidence of using AI or automation tooling to improve delivery efficiency, with judgment about where it genuinely helps and where it introduces risk.
  • Comfort operating in a shared-staffing model where engineers are mobilized across initiatives by business need and technical fit.
  • Judgment to escalate enterprise-level trade-offs rather than absorb them, and to make scope and sequence calls transparently.
• PREFERRED:
  • Formal product management experience in a digital or customer-facing product domain.
  • Familiarity with platform and cloud engineering environments, including AWS.
  • Experience working alongside a managed-services or vendor engagement model.
  • Experience developing emerging leaders identified through a succession or talent-review process.