Director of Engineering

About Ovative Group

Ovative Group is an independent, full-funnel media, measurement, and creative firm. Leveraging our deep industry expertise, we help brands like Best Buy, Domino's, American Eagle, The Home Depot, Post, Disney, Tumi, Michael Kors, Boost Mobile, and UnitedHealth Group transform their media and measurement programs. The result? Profitable growth that speaks for itself. At Ovative, we don't just track data, we redefine success.

About The Role

We are looking for a seasoned Director of Engineering to join our Engineering organization at Ovative Group. In this role, you will directly lead the Data Products and BI & Reporting teams, serving as the senior engineering leader responsible for the quality, operational health, and delivery of these product engineering teams, while sitting as part of our broader Engineering leadership org.

Responsibilities

• Define, implement, and continuously improve development standards, coding guidelines, and engineering governance controls across all product teams
• Own the quality framework for engineering: code review standards, testing strategy, release gates, and technical debt management
• Champion security, compliance, and data governance best practices within the engineering organization, including SOC2 alignment
• Drive architectural consistency and scalability across the EMRge platform, our proprietary technology product stack, and associated services
• Evaluate and introduce new tools, technologies, and practices that advance engineering maturity
• Own and partner across the full software development lifecycle (SDLC) from planning through deployment, ensuring predictable, repeatable delivery processes
• Build and maintain the DevOps infrastructure and toolchain that enables developer productivity and deployment confidence
• Partner with Engineering Managers to deliver sprint planning, capacity management, and delivery forecasting
• Track and deliver engineering health metrics including cycle time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery
• Identify and systematically resolve developer experience friction across environments, tooling, and workflows
• Directly manage and develop a team of Engineering Managers and Lead Engineers, providing coaching, expectation-setting, and career development support
• Foster a culture of accountability, psychological safety, continuous learning, and high standards
• Partner with recruiting to attract and retain outstanding engineering talent; participate actively in hiring processes and candidate assessment
• Drive team health through regular engagement, meaningful 1:1s, and proactive identification and resolution of morale or performance issues
• Elevate Ovative’s engineering brand through internal development programs, external community engagement, and content creation
• Serve as the senior engineering accountability layer for on-time, high-quality delivery of product features and platform capabilities
• Partner with Product leadership to align roadmap priorities with engineering capacity and technical constraints
• Remove cross-functional blockers that impede delivery; escalate and resolve dependency and coordination issues across teams
• Provide transparent, accurate delivery forecasting and status communication to engineering and product leadership
• Balance velocity and sustainability—ensuring teams can maintain delivery pace without compromising quality or team health

Requirements

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, including direct management of Engineering Managers or senior technical leads
• Demonstrated ability to build and run engineering operating systems: SDLC ownership, DevOps maturity, quality governance, and delivery metrics
• Track record of developing high-performing, engaged engineering teams through coaching, accountability, and culture-building
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills with the ability to lead discussions with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including senior product and business leaders
• Ability to communicate technical concepts, tradeoffs, and delivery risk clearly to executive audiences
• Previous hands-on software development experience (front-end, back-end, or data engineering)

Preferred Experience

• In a data-intensive SaaS or analytics product environment
• Familiarity with SOC2 compliance requirements and implementation in an engineering context
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and modern data infrastructure
• Background in marketing technology, measurement, or analytics platforms