WHAT DOES AN ENGINEERING DIRECTOR DO?
Published: Dec 04, 2024 – The Engineering Director leads engineering teams to deliver enhanced web user experiences, modernize codebases, and accelerate development through strategic planning and technical oversight. This position drives Agile adoption, fosters cross-functional workflows, and ensures alignment of projects with organizational goals and strategies. The director also cultivates a collaborative culture, mentors engineers for career growth, and improves processes to deliver high-quality customer value.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Engineering Director
1. Engineering Director Job Description
- Product Development: Drive the development of product features that unlock subscription offerings.
- Team Leadership: Hire, build, and manage high-performance teams.
- User Experience Design: User experience and user journey-focused product development that deliver incremental wins and enforce proving hypotheses first.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate with cross-functional leaders to strategize, define, refine, and align project initiatives and goals.
- Requirement Translation: Translate requirements to solution vision and technical directions.
- Communication: Communicate and align plans to broader leadership as well as dependency teams.
- Coaching and Innovation: Coach individuals, inspire creative thinking, and foster innovation with measurable increments in improving user experience.
- Software Development Best Practices: Guide teams in best practices around software development, documentation, coding standards, performance, fault tolerance, and scalability.
- Culture Building: Embrace a culture of collaboration, transparency, inclusion, respect, and feedback with open and direct communication.
- Financial Planning: Prepare capital expenditure requests with a detailed analysis of expenses, resources needed, and timeline.
- Lean and Six Sigma: Drive solid results by assisting Lean and Six Sigma Initiatives.
2. Engineering Director Job Summary
- Team Scaling: Rapidly scale the TDS (Transactional Data Services) engineering teams, through the recruitment and development of top engineering talent.
- Data Strategy: Help Twilio define a company-wide Data Service Strategy and play a key role in its delivery.
- Roadmap Development: Work with the TDS team to shape a roadmap to meet the company’s Data Service Strategy.
- Product Lifecycle Management: Lead and prioritize the product lifecycle/engineering schedule (operations, release, development, QA, and support) for a portfolio of products.
- Feature Delivery: Work with partner teams to prioritize and deliver critical features in a timely and Agile fashion.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate effectively with Engineering, Product, and other business leaders at Twilio.
- Customer Requirement Fulfillment: Partner cross-functionally to ensure the TDS roadmap fulfills internal customer requirements.
- Innovation and Infrastructure Management: Balance the creation of new functionality for current and future customer needs, infrastructure management, and the elimination of technical debt.
- Empowerment and Success: Empower teams toward innovation and customer success.
- Partner Alignment: Ensure key partners understand the needs of development teams.
- Business Alignment: Ensure the engineering team understands the business direction and how each engineer’s work contributes towards the big picture of the product line and company offerings.
3. Engineering Director Details and Accountabilities
- Feasibility Analysis: Determine engineering feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and customer demand for new and existing products.
- Strategic Planning: Develop a strategic plan in unison with the specific corporate objectives to accomplish departmental goals and objectives each fiscal year.
- Operational Efficiency: Identify ways to increase operational productivity (i.e., warehouse, manufacturing, reorder buying, and production control).
- Performance Metrics: Develop appropriate metrics to track progress towards the achievement of departmental initiatives, provide regular updates to supervisor and other members of leadership.
- Quality Protocol Development: Develop quality protocols for new packaging material.
- Product Quality Assurance: Ensure that new products meet the strict quality and performance standards set by the division (i.e., burst testing and tensile tests).
- Knowledge Transfer and Training: Act as the leader for engineering knowledge transfer, train and develop staff members to be exemplary performers in all process development and general engineering efforts.
- Project Management: Continually focus managerial efforts on project cost, schedule, and performance while keeping product and process quality levels high.
- Process Improvement: Make recommendations for improvements and implement improvement efforts as appropriate.
- Performance Management: Focus on effective performance management with all staff interactions.
- Feedback and Resources: Provide ongoing feedback along with the necessary resources to improve performance when applicable while also finding solutions to reward strong performance.
- HR Partnership: Partner with the Human Resources department to complete regular performance management tasks as well as find solutions to challenging performance management issues.
- Regulatory Compliance: Establish and maintain compliance with government and international regulatory requirements (i.e., FDA, CGMPs, ISO, DOH, OSHA, EPA, etc.).
4. Engineering Director Essential Functions
- Team Management: Manage and scale multi-location engineering organization.
- Recruitment: Hire and onboard new team members at a rapid pace.
- Innovation Delivery: Deliver innovation roadmap defined by product managers, while also serving a client base of 1000+ customers and helping on-prem customers transition to cloud.
- Agile Process Optimization: Optimize and streamline agile development processes, and lead automation of QA and deployment processes.
- Technology Leverage: Leverage modern technologies in innovation (AI, Predictive Analytics).
- Continuous Delivery: Define and implement a consistent and repeatable process for continuous delivery with quality assurance.
- Competitive Advantage: Evaluate and apply modern technologies to ensure competitive technical advantage.
- Culture Building: Promote a diverse, dynamic, collaborative, transparent culture where everyone's ideas and opinions are equally valued.
- Mentorship: Mentor, guide, and serve less experienced team members to create a high-performance engineering team.
- High-Performance Culture: Cultivate a high-performing, engineering-empowered culture.
- Cloud Platform Development: Partner with the Chief Technology Officer to develop, design, and implement ONI's cloud-based analytical platform.
- Team Leadership: Grow, manage, and lead the Software, and depending on the candidate, Cloud teams.
- SDK Development: Create a development roadmap for platform-specific SDKs.
- Cloud Architecture: Provide thought leadership for cloud-based architecture, and work with other leaders to embrace ONI's cloud-based data architecture and strategy.
- Data Platform Architecture: Develop reference architecture and roadmap to build scalable, stable, and resilient data platforms to process a wide variety of high-volume, high-velocity data.
5. Engineering Director Role Purpose
- Team Management: Direct daily and preventative engineering works, plan and assign work ensuring you always have the right team in place.
- Performance Coaching: Develop team and improve their performance through coaching and feedback, create performance and development goals for colleagues - and recognize good performance.
- Teamwork and Communication: Promote teamwork and quality service through daily communication and coordination with other departments.
- Departmental Coordination: Communicate with hotel department heads to stay informed of maintenance needs and ensure timely responses to requests.
- Root Cause Analysis: Perform root cause analysis and implement action plans associated with the corrective actions to ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
- Budget Management: Prepare the annual budget for Engineering and Advanced Engineering and make budgetary recommendations to leadership.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Develop functional business relationships with internal partners to ensure effective cross-departmental functionality and strong implementation of business strategy.
- Project Integration: Ensure projects are integrated and aligned with other business activities, improvement projects, and business strategies and coordinated with the appropriate project/process owners to accomplish the project goals.
- Engineering Leadership: Lead campus engineering team, combined with full-stack, backend, mobile, and infrastructure engineers.
- Product Design and Delivery: Own the design, execution, quality, and end-to-end delivery of highly scalable products that impact clients’ everyday lives.
- Business and Engineering Alignment: Work closely with product and business partners, understand their needs, and drive the business with the engineering team.
- Technical Translation: Communicate and translate business needs to technical requirements, provide guidance and context to the team, and ensure they know the WHY and not just the WHAT.
- Cross-functional Projects: Collaborate with senior management to drive horizontal projects across the company.
6. Engineering Director General Responsibilities
- Team Leadership: Lead teams of frontend and full-stack engineers.
- Web Development and Architecture: Deliver features that improve the web user experience and oversee architectural efforts to modernize the codebase and speed up development.
- Project Management: Manage complex technical projects and partner with Product Management to plan roadmaps and drive strategy including client-side monitoring, reliability, and performance.
- Agile Adoption: Partner with Program Management to lead on the adoption of Agile as a standard way of working.
- Agile Champion: Champion Agile principles and practices, support specific sprint team activities like sprint planning, write user stories and story-pointing, and collaborate across DevOps and DesignOps to create ideal workflows across teams.
- Stakeholder Communication: Represent teams’ work and proposals to senior and cross-org leadership, ensuring good alignment with company goals and strategy.
- Culture Building: Foster a culture of collaboration, respect, engineering/operational excellence, and regular delivery of customer value.
- Process Improvement: Work with other managers/leaders on organization-wide initiatives, creating and improving processes that drive clarity of thought, clarity of ownership, and increased quality and value for customers.
- Technical Guidance: Provide technical and project guidance, career development, and mentoring to teams.
- Talent Development: Coach and grow ICs to create a strong pipeline of future Senior Engineers and leaders.