Senior Director, Engineering - AI, Photos and Personalization

Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the long-term technical strategy and architectural roadmap for Shutterfly’s Photos Platform, AI, Personalization, Marketing engineering and Identity platforms ensuring security, scalability, and extensibility are built in by design.
• Develop a collaborative and inclusive high-performance team that fosters a culture of ownership, experimentation and innovation to prioritize the things that will have the biggest impact on both users and the businesses and deliver working solutions for our customers.
• Responsible for delivering on AI-driven business KPIs including personalization lift, conversion improvement, engagement growth, automated product creation adoption, and marketing performance optimization.
• Define and execute the AI platform strategy including model lifecycle management, experimentation frameworks, model observability, and responsible AI practices.
• Lead development of scalable AI systems for photos, generative content creation, and real-time personalization across web, mobile, and marketing channels.
• Establish rigorous experimentation and evaluation frameworks to validate AI-driven customer experiences and optimize for measurable business impact.
• Build reusable AI and data platform capabilities including feature stores, training pipelines, and model monitoring systems to support multiple consumer-facing applications.
• Drive adoption of AI-enabled development practices and automation to increase engineering productivity and accelerate innovation.
• Own end-to-end engineering delivery of platform capabilities by partnering with product, UX, and business leaders. Represent the technology function in C-suite discussions to align priorities and outcomes.
• Represent the technology function in C-suite discussions to align priorities and outcomes.
• Provide architectural leadership and technical oversight across platform teams to ensure scalable, resilient, and high-performance systems and drive execution from product vision through delivery.
• Measure success through customer experience improvements, platform reliability (SLOs), delivery velocity, cost efficiency, and AI-enabled productivity gains.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in engineering leadership with a track record of building and leading high-performing global engineering organizations.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams that build and operate AI/ML systems in production, including experience with model training, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring at scale.
• Experience building personalization, recommendation, ranking, or generative AI systems in consumer-facing applications.
• Proven experience architecting and delivering highly available, scalable, and low-latency systems for high-traffic applications.
• Demonstrated success leading end-to-end engineering delivery of large-scale systems across distributed teams.
• Strong technical expertise across architecture, system design, cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), and modern development practices.
• Familiarity with modern MLOps practices, experimentation platforms, and large-scale data processing systems.
• Experience defining and implementing AI and automation strategies that drive measurable business and productivity outcomes.
• Deep understanding of secure software development lifecycle (SDL), Shift-Left principles, and vulnerability management.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence at all levels — from engineers to executives.
• Strong business and product orientation, with the ability to balance innovation, execution, and operational rigor.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; advanced technical degree preferred.