Software Engineering Director

About the role

The Software Engineering Director is an executive technical leader in the Data & AI department responsible for setting the strategic direction, architecture, and engineering excellence of the firm's AI-powered platforms and cloud-native systems. Reporting directly to senior leadership, this role owns the vision and delivery of large-scale, distributed engineering programs — from agentic AI orchestration and GenAI platforms to enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure — while building and leading high-performing engineering organizations across multiple teams and geographies. This is a strategic engineering leadership role requiring an executive who has built and scaled complex systems at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for the firm's AI and cloud-native engineering platforms, including agentic AI orchestration, GenAI-assisted delivery tools, and enterprise cloud infrastructure.
• Architect and govern large-scale distributed systems spanning multi-tenant SaaS, event-driven microservices, cloud-native platforms on Azure, and AI-first application layers including RAG pipelines, vector search, and LLM integrations.
• Establish enterprise architecture standards, architecture review boards, and AI governance and compliance controls across regulated environments.
• Lead and grow an engineering organization, setting direction for engineering managers, architects, and senior engineers.
• Partner with business and practice leadership to translate complex requirements into scalable platform capabilities, opening new revenue opportunities through technology productization.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of major platform programs from inception through production scale, ensuring reliability, security, and compliance at each phase.
• Drive operational excellence — setting standards for observability, incident response, capacity planning, and cost optimization across cloud platforms.
• Champion engineering culture: foster technical mentorship, talent development, and continuous improvement across the engineering organization.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies — including agentic AI frameworks, model orchestration platforms, and cloud-native tooling — to maintain competitive technical advantage.

Requirements

• Required Education and/or Experience:
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field; or equivalent professional experience with demonstrable enterprise architecture expertise.
  • Minimum 15 years of progressive software engineering experience, including significant time in architecture and engineering leadership roles.
  • Minimum 5 years of experience leading large engineering organizations across multiple teams or geographies.
  • Proven track record architecting and delivering enterprise-scale distributed systems — including cloud-native platforms, agentic AI systems, and microservices — in production environments.
  • Deep expertise in GenAI and agentic system architecture including LLM application design, multi-agent orchestration frameworks, RAG pipelines, vector search, and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
  • Hands-on experience with Azure cloud platform services including Azure AI Foundry, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Service Bus, Azure PostgreSQL, and related managed services.
  • Demonstrated ability to translate engineering investment into business outcomes — including revenue growth, cost reduction, and operational efficiency — with quantifiable results.
  • Experience establishing and leading architecture governance, including architecture review boards and AI, security, and compliance controls in regulated environments.
  • Proficiency in Python, C#, Java, or equivalent enterprise languages; familiarity with modern AI frameworks including LangGraph, Claude SDK, or Temporal.
  • Experience with enterprise security and compliance requirements including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
• Preferred Experience:
  • Background in productizing internal platform capabilities into revenue-generating offerings.
  • Azure certifications at the expert level (AZ-305, AZ-400) or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
  • Expert-level Infrastructure-as-Code proficiency in Bicep or Terraform for large-scale cloud environments.
  • Experience in professional services industries (legal, financial services, accounting, or consulting).
  • Familiarity with legal technology, document management systems, or AI-assisted knowledge work platforms.

Skills and Abilities

• Strong organizational skills
• Strong attention to detail
• Good judgment
• Strong interpersonal communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Able to work harmoniously and effectively with others
• Able to preserve confidentiality and exercise discretion
• Able to work under pressure
• Able to manage multiple projects with competing deadlines and priorities