Sr. Director, Engineering – Digital

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Work Arrangement: Hybrid / On-site; candidates must be willing to relocate to the Philadelphia area

Employment Type: Full-Time, Direct Hire

Position Summary

Our client is seeking a Sr. Director, Engineering – Digital to provide strategic technology leadership across customer-facing digital experiences, including e-commerce websites and native mobile applications.

This leader will help define the long-term digital technology roadmap while overseeing the architecture, delivery, performance, security, reliability, and continued modernization of large-scale digital platforms.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience leading engineering strategy for high-traffic e-commerce environments and can partner closely with product, digital, marketing, data, and engineering leaders to translate business priorities into scalable technology solutions and measurable customer outcomes.

Responsibilities

Digital Strategy & Leadership

• Partner with digital, marketing, product, and technology leaders to define multi-year technology strategies and roadmaps for web and mobile experiences.
• Translate business priorities and customer objectives into engineering goals, technology investments, and measurable outcomes.
• Help shape the future direction of digital platforms beyond the current technology roadmap.
• Drive strategies supporting digital growth, customer experience, platform scalability, security, and performance.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and capabilities that can improve the digital customer experience.
• Identify opportunities to incorporate AI capabilities into existing and future digital platforms.
• Balance new development, modernization, innovation, technical debt reduction, and platform stability.

Product & Business Partnership

• Serve as a strategic technology partner to product, digital, marketing, data, UX, merchandising, and other business stakeholders.
• Partner with product leadership to prioritize initiatives across growth, customer experience, platform health, security, and compliance.
• Translate business and customer needs into practical technology strategies.
• Communicate technology priorities, trade-offs, risks, and investment requirements to senior stakeholders.
• Use customer and business metrics to help guide technology decisions and roadmap priorities.

Digital Engineering & Operations

• Provide leadership across large-scale e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
• Ensure digital platforms meet expectations for performance, availability, scalability, security, and reliability.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering delivery and operational performance.
• Partner with engineering and operations teams to address complex production issues and implement long-term fixes.
• Improve customer-facing experiences by identifying and addressing friction points and recurring technology issues.
• Establish and monitor engineering and operational performance metrics.
• Support experimentation and data-driven improvements to customer experience, conversion, engagement, and retention.

Architecture & Platform Strategy

• Provide strategic and technical leadership across modern digital architectures.
• Develop and maintain roadmaps for digital platforms, architecture, and modernization.
• Guide the evolution of scalable web, mobile, API, microservices, cloud, and event-driven architectures.
• Evaluate opportunities for platform modernization and replatforming.
• Support modern headless and composable architecture strategies where appropriate.
• Drive engineering standards around security, performance, automated testing, deployment, monitoring, and observability.
• Partner with architecture, infrastructure, data, and security teams to ensure digital platforms align with broader enterprise standards.
• Help determine build-vs-buy decisions for digital technologies and capabilities.

Security & Engineering Excellence

• Ensure security is incorporated throughout the digital technology strategy and engineering lifecycle.
• Drive modern DevSecOps, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, and release-management practices.
• Ensure customer-facing platforms meet appropriate governance, risk, security, and compliance requirements.
• Partner with technical teams to improve platform resiliency and reduce operational risk.
• Continuously evaluate technology trends and recommend improvements to architecture, engineering productivity, and customer experience.

People & Partner Leadership

• Provide leadership across internal engineering teams, contractors, and technology partners.
• Develop engineering leaders and senior technical resources.
• Foster accountability, collaboration, continuous learning, and high engineering standards.
• Manage relationships with digital technology vendors, implementation partners, and other external providers.
• Evaluate vendor performance and ensure external partners meet delivery, quality, scalability, and cost expectations.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, digital technology, or related disciplines.
• 7+ years of experience leading engineering teams responsible for high-traffic, business-critical digital experiences.
• Significant experience with customer-facing e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
• Demonstrated experience within high-volume retail, e-commerce, or consumer-facing environments.
• Proven experience developing and executing digital technology strategies and multi-year roadmaps.
• Experience leading multiple significant e-commerce website initiatives or transformations.
• Strong understanding of modern web and mobile architectures, including:
  • APIs
  • Microservices
  • Event-driven architectures
  • Cloud-native technologies
• Strong understanding of digital platform performance, scalability, security, and reliability.
• Experience partnering with digital, product, marketing, and engineering leadership.
• Demonstrated ability to connect engineering initiatives with business and customer outcomes.
• Experience supporting digital capabilities such as e-commerce, order management, omnichannel fulfillment, personalization, search, loyalty, or related customer experiences.
• Strong experience with DevOps/DevSecOps, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, and production operations.
• Experience managing technology vendors, implementation partners, and blended engineering teams.
• Strong executive communication, stakeholder management, and strategic leadership skills.
• Experience evaluating and incorporating AI or emerging technologies into digital platforms and customer experiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading a major e-commerce replatforming initiative.
• Experience with headless or composable commerce transformations.
• Experience with large-scale retail or consumer digital environments.
• Experience with digital analytics, experimentation, and optimization.
• Strong understanding of website performance, SEO, conversion optimization, and mobile performance.
• Experience working across complex, matrixed technology and business organizations.