Director, Engineering

• Compensation: CAD 150,000 - CAD 176,000 - yearly Company Description NIQ is the world’s leading consumer intelligence company, delivering the most complete understanding of consumer buying behavior and revealing new pathways to growth. In 2023, NIQ combined with GfK, bringing together the two industry leaders with unparalleled global reach. With a holistic retail read and the most comprehensive consumer insights—delivered with advanced analytics through state-of-the-art platforms—NIQ delivers the Full View™. Job Description About the Role We are seeking a Director, Software Engineering to lead the engineering teams building and operating customer-facing SaaS product capabilities from our India engineering hub. This leader is accountable for the delivery, quality, and technical health of a significant part of our product engineering portfolio, and for building the engineering leadership and technical talent that sustains it. This is a people leadership role with deep software engineering roots. The successful candidate will lead through Engineering Managers, Senior Managers, and Principal Engineers, remain credible in architecture and system design discussions, and translate product and business priorities into clear, executable engineering direction. The role operates in a globally distributed, matrixed environment and partners closely with Product Management, Architecture, Data, Security, and Quality Engineering. The ideal candidate raises the engineering bar, improves delivery predictability and production quality, and helps move mature SaaS capabilities toward an AI-first product and engineering model. Key Responsibilities Engineering Delivery and Execution • Own engineering delivery outcomes for a defined set of customer-facing SaaS product capabilities, including scope, quality, predictability, and time to market. • Translate product roadmaps and business priorities into executable engineering plans, team commitments, and sequenced delivery milestones through subordinate managers and technical leaders. • Set team and department priorities, allocate engineering resources across competing demands, and manage capacity, staffing plans, and budget inputs for the area. • Balance new feature development with modernization, technical debt reduction, and continuity of existing customer commitments. • Use engineering metrics — delivery predictability, cycle time, escaped defects, change failure rate, and availability — to identify systemic issues and drive measurable improvement. • Manage delivery risk proactively, escalating with clear options and recommendations rather than surfacing problems late. Technical Leadership, Architecture, and System Design • Provide hands-on-credible technical leadership in architecture reviews, design discussions, and critical engineering trade-off decisions across the teams in scope. • Guide the design, modernization, and operation of large-scale distributed systems, cloud-native services, APIs, and data-intensive product platforms. • Direct the identification and resolution of complex, multi-dimensional technical and operational problems, leveraging resources within and outside the immediate area. • Challenge legacy assumptions constructively and drive improvements in scalability, reliability, performance, security, maintainability, and cost efficiency. • Ensure architectural decisions in the area are documented, consistent with enterprise standards, and aligned to the longer-term platform direction set by senior engineering leadership. • Raise the standard of design discipline, code quality, and technical decision-making across the teams. AI-First Product and Engineering Adoption • Drive adoption of AI-enabled capabilities within the product area, partnering with Product, Architecture, Data Science, and Responsible AI stakeholders. • Apply GenAI tools and AI-assisted engineering practices across the SDLC to improve developer productivity, code and test quality, documentation, and modernization throughput. • Establish practical guardrails for AI usage in engineering workflows in line with NIQ security, privacy, and data governance standards. • Evaluate AI adoption on measurable outcomes — customer value, quality, and speed — rather than on tooling activity. Production Excellence and Engineering Operations • Ensure the capabilities in scope are designed, delivered, and operated to strong standards for reliability, availability, scalability, performance, security, and quality. • Strengthen engineering practices across CI/CD, test automation, observability, operational readiness, and incident management. • Own the operational health of the area, including on-call effectiveness, incident response, root cause analysis, and follow-through on corrective actions. • Promote a production-first mindset in which operability, supportability, resilience, and cloud cost efficiency are treated as core design considerations. People Leadership and Talent Development • Lead, coach, and develop Engineering Managers, Senior Managers, and Principal Engineers; occasionally manage senior individual contributors directly. • Own performance management for the area, including goal setting, performance appraisals, pay review input, development planning, and succession planning. • Build the India engineering talent pipeline through hiring, onboarding, internal mobility, and targeted capability building in AI, cloud, and modern engineering practices. • Shape team structure, spans, and ownership boundaries so teams have clear accountability and sustainable workloads. • Create a culture of ownership, accountability, constructive challenge, customer focus, inclusion, and continuous learning. • Lead effectively across time zones and cultures within a globally distributed engineering organization. Stakeholder Partnership and Influence • Partner with Product Management, Architecture, Design, Data, Security, and Quality Engineering to align on priorities, dependencies, and investment trade-offs. • Influence peers, senior engineering leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders to build consensus and adopt recommendations. • Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences, translating engineering topics into business-relevant decisions, risks, and outcomes. • Represent the India engineering organization in global forums, planning cycles, and technical governance discussions. Qualifications • Bachelor’s degree in Computer science, Engineering, or a related technical field; advanced degree preferred. • 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including 4+ years of formal people leadership. • Proven experience managing engineering managers and/or principal-level engineers, with accountability for a multi-team area or sub-function. • Demonstrated success delivering customer-facing enterprise SaaS products, data-intensive platforms, analytics products, or comparable large-scale commercial software. • Experience improving engineering outcomes in mature SaaS environments through modernization, technical debt reduction, quality improvement, and delivery acceleration. • Experience leading or contributing to AI-enabled product capability development within enterprise SaaS or comparable environments. • Experience working in globally distributed, matrixed engineering organizations, including partnering with teams and leaders outside India. Technical Expertise • Strong software engineering background with practical depth in system design, distributed systems, and architecture. • Solid understanding of cloud-native architecture, scalable platform design, API design, integration patterns, performance optimization, and reliability engineering. • Prior hands-on engineering experience and leadership familiarity with technologies used by modern SaaS teams, including Java, Python, Angular, Azure cloud services, and AI/GenAI technologies and frameworks. • Ability to evaluate architectural options, cha