WHAT DOES A DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING DO?
Published: Mar 06, 2025 - The Director of Engineering orchestrates the complete lifecycle of e-commerce development projects, from hiring and team assembly to project delivery. Coordinates with various departments, ensuring effective communication with stakeholders and C-suite executives. Manages timelines, risks, and resources, emphasizing agile methods and quality assurance to align with strategic e-commerce objectives.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Director of Engineering
1. Director of Engineering Duties
- Leadership: Provide overall leadership on development efforts across the project portfolio
- Team Management: Manage and build a team of full-time and contractor developers, QA, and DevOps
- Task Delivery: Successfully deliver the engineering tasks, both day-to-day, sprint-to-sprint, and overall
- Process Improvement: Continuously improve development methodologies and apply best practices across teams
- Portfolio Management: Manage a large portfolio of websites, mobile applications, and back-office applications
- Development Frameworks: Provide front-end and back-end development frameworks
- Automation: Develop a very strong CI/CD pipeline with a heavy focus on automation and agility
- Quality Assurance: Manage the manual and automation QA process across multiple teams
- Cloud Infrastructure: Leverage cloud-based infrastructures as much as possible
- Software Architecture: Design software architecture to efficiently deploy new consumer experiences
- Collaboration: Collaborate with product, user experience, and internal stakeholders on all initiatives
- Prototyping: Rapidly develop software prototypes to demonstrate functionality
- Integration: Effectively integrate with third-party solutions
- Platform Evaluation: Lead the evaluation of software platforms and applications
- Leadership: Provide leadership to ensure company deliver on goals for the product area
2. Director of Engineering Details
- Quality Assurance: Establish processes, procedures, and metrics to ensure high-quality software
- Risk Management: Enumerate and communicate risks to plans, work with stakeholders to mitigate risks
- Technical Guidance: Provide technical guidance to teams to ensure optimal, modern, forward-looking software and architecture solutions
- Best Practices: Promote software best practices around quality, code hygiene, peer review, continuous delivery, and DevOps culture
- Roadmap Collaboration: Collaborate with Sema4 technology leadership to set and evolve the Product Engineering technology roadmap
- Technology Strategy: Adopt a forward-looking technology roadmap for Product Engineering
- Culture Building: Foster a strong culture of care, craftsmanship, quality, accountability, and transparency
- Engineering Management: Complete responsibility for all of the engineering, including product development, advanced engineering, manufacturing & process engineering, new product launches, capital projects, and continuous improvement
- Team Development: Development of the engineering staff, building a strong team - can coach and mentor the existing engineers and technical staff
- Documentation: Make sure all drawings & files are in line and properly documented
- Process Improvement: Drive process best practices within the department as well as the production floor
- Collaboration: Partner with all other department heads in developing processes and procedures
- Continuous Improvement: Champion a continuous improvement culture utilizing Lean Manufacturing tools
- Leadership: Lead a Results-Oriented team approach across the organization, constantly improving employee morale via effective communication and follow-up
3. Director of Engineering Responsibilities
- Team Management: Manage, motivate, and empower a team of software engineers, including goal setting, feedback on performance, and 1:1's
- Engineering Practices: Define and drive engineering practices, collaboratively with other members of the engineering leadership
- Process Improvement: Identify, spearhead, and drive successful initiative-wide improvements
- Manager Development: Manage, develop, and support engineering managers and lead engineers in a way that increases engagement and productivity
- Talent Acquisition: Help to recruit and retain the technical talent needed to achieve organizational goals and objectives
- Inclusive Culture: Foster an inclusive engineering culture that encourages team members to embrace core values
- Success Metrics: Define and drive key success metrics and communicate progress to executive stakeholders
- Performance Monitoring: Monitor performance, impact, execution, and delivery across all teams, identify risks and solutions, and drive improvements with engineers and managers
- Feedback: Regularly provide clear, actionable feedback in all directions, and find the appropriate group venues to do so
- Leadership: Serve as an exemplary model for optimism, bring solutions to surfaced problems, and coach others to do the same
- Task Breakdown: Break down larger initiatives into digestible tasks for the engineering team
- Forecasting: Provide proactive forecasting of deliverables and timelines
- Code Review: Ensure technical standards and architectural goals are consistently met by performing code reviews
- Team Culture: Build a thoughtful and respectful team culture, and remove barriers to adopting new tech/process/architecture/methodologies
- Support: Unblock and assist team members by diving in on tougher development tasks
4. Director of Engineering Accountabilities
- Technical Leadership: Provide hands-on technical and organizational leadership and mentoring to the engineering team
- Team Leadership: Lead multi-disciplinary R&D team of project management, electrical, mechanical, software, digital solutions, systems development, testing, compliance and change management functions
- Resource Management: Plan and allocate appropriate engineering resources for projects and provide scheduling, man-power, asset allocation, budgets and estimates to complete programs by the deadline
- Collaboration: Close cooperation with the OE engineering team, to ensure software/digital development engineering and test engineering resources are available and dedicated
- Product Strategy: Work closely with Product Management and Global Leadership to define product strategy and requirements
- Goal Setting: Establish engineering department goals, objectives, performance metrics, and initiatives to support corporate objectives
- Work Planning: Direct daily and preventative engineering works, plan and assign work, ensuring always have the right team in place
- Team Development: Develop team and improve performance through coaching and feedback, create performance and development goals for colleagues, and recognize good performance
- Teamwork: Promote teamwork and quality service through daily communication and coordination with other departments
- Communication: Communicate with hotel department heads to stay informed of maintenance needs and ensure timely responses to requests
- Guest Satisfaction: Strong focus on proactively meeting guest expectations to ensure satisfaction levels are achieved
- Technical Leadership: Provide the team with technical leadership and contribute technically to projects
- Collaboration: Work closely with other teams, especially within engineering and product development
- Perception Systems: Create advanced perception systems to enable the vehicle to accurately perceive and react to its surrounding environment
- Project Management: Take responsibility for the overall planning, execution and success of complex technical projects
5. Director of Engineering Functions
- Team Management: Manage and build the e-commerce development team including hiring developers and other team members
- Communication: Communicate effectively with various teams including project stakeholders and C-suite executives
- Project Management: Plan, design, and manage projects through full-lifecycle, requirements definition, and QA
- Timeline Management: Create project timelines, and manage development milestones and deliverables
- Requirement Analysis: Perform requirement analysis and prepare specification documents
- Vision Communication: Communicate a clear vision of key objectives and motivate the team to achieve them
- Resource Management: Utilize necessary resources and skills to produce project deliverables within the agreed cost, timescale, and quality parameters
- Agile Planning: Assist the development team in agile sprint planning and execution
- Risk Analysis: Analyze risk, establish contingency plans, and have responsibility for initiating mitigating action
- Vendor Management: Manage third-party vendors for functions such as design, search, personalization, web monitoring, etc.
- Vendor Selection: Participate in third-party vendor selection and negotiation process
- Reporting: Produce reports for executives and project owners to stay in sync and be notified of project progress and status
- Prioritization: Prioritize and manage website initiatives to support overall eCommerce goals
- Mentorship: Mentor and share best practices related to project management
- Quality Ownership: Take ownership of the overall quality of projects as well as creating an excellent experience for customers and end-users