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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Director of Technology

💰 $ - $

TechnologyLeadershipIT Management

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Director of Technology to own and accelerate the organization's technology strategy, lead multi-disciplinary engineering and operations teams, and ensure secure, scalable, and cost-effective delivery of products and platforms. This role is responsible for translating business strategy into technology roadmaps, driving cloud and platform initiatives, establishing strong operational practices (DevOps, SRE, CI/CD), and partnering with product and business leaders to deliver measurable outcomes such as uptime, performance, product velocity, and technical debt reduction. The ideal candidate blends hands-on technical judgment, proven people leadership, vendor and budget management, and a strategic outlook toward AI/ML, data, and digital transformation.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Engineering Manager with cross-functional delivery experience
  • Head of Infrastructure / Cloud Architect transitioning into broader leadership
  • Enterprise IT Director or Head of Platform Engineering

Advancement To:

  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
  • VP of Engineering or VP of Technology
  • Chief Information Officer (CIO) / Chief Digital Officer (CDO)

Lateral Moves:

  • Head of Product (for technically oriented product leaders)
  • Head of Data & AI / Director of Data Platforms

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Define, own, and communicate a 12–36 month technology strategy and roadmap that aligns with corporate goals, drives measurable business outcomes, and prioritizes customer value, scalability, security, and cost efficiency.
  • Lead, mentor, and scale engineering, IT operations, SRE, platform and security teams (direct and dotted-line), setting clear objectives (OKRs/KPIs), career paths, hiring plans, and performance expectations to build high-performing, accountable teams.
  • Architect and operationalize cloud-first infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) and platform services using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/ARM/CloudFormation) to ensure repeatable, auditable, and scalable deployments.
  • Drive the adoption and maturation of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) to increase deployment frequency and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Own technical governance, architecture reviews, and standards for microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, and data platforms to reduce technical debt and enable faster, safer feature delivery.
  • Lead vendor selection, contract negotiation and ongoing vendor management for SaaS and technology providers, establishing SLAs, cost controls, and evaluation metrics to maximize value and limit vendor risk.
  • Partner with Product, Marketing, Sales, and Finance to prioritize technology investments, define business cases, manage roadmap trade-offs, and measure ROI on major initiatives.
  • Establish and manage the technology budget and capital expenditures (CapEx/Opex), forecasting spend, tracking performance against budget, and implementing cost optimization strategies including cloud cost governance and rightsizing.
  • Define and drive information security and compliance strategy, collaborating with security and legal teams to implement controls aligned to NIST, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and relevant industry or regulatory requirements.
  • Implement observability and telemetry (APM, logging, distributed tracing, monitoring) to provide end-to-end visibility into system health, performance, user experience, and to enable data-driven operational decisions.
  • Lead incident response and post-incident reviews, owning remediation plans and institutionalizing runbooks, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement practices to increase system reliability.
  • Oversee data engineering and analytics platform strategy to enable self-service BI, real-time streaming, and ML/AI initiatives; ensure data governance, lineage, cataloging and secure access across teams.
  • Drive modernization initiatives (legacy migration, API-first strategy, cloud migration, microservices refactor) to improve agility and reduce ongoing maintenance overhead while managing migration risks.
  • Champion software quality through code review standards, automated quality gates, performance testing, and test-data management to reduce defects and accelerate time-to-market.
  • Create and maintain enterprise architecture artifacts — roadmaps, capability maps, integration diagrams, and reference architectures — to guide development and integration efforts consistently.
  • Lead cross-functional programs and enterprise-wide digital transformation initiatives, acting as the technology lead for M&A integration, product expansions, or platform consolidations.
  • Establish metrics and dashboards for engineering productivity, operational reliability (SLA/SLO), security posture, and business KPIs to provide transparent reporting to the executive team and Board.
  • Build and institutionalize a change management practice to ensure safe, predictable delivery of high-impact releases with minimal business disruption.
  • Serve as a trusted advisor to the executive leadership team, translating complex technical trade-offs into business impact and advising on technology risk, opportunity, and timing.
  • Drive recruitment, retention, and skills development initiatives—mentorship programs, training budgets, and career ladders—to close critical skills gaps in cloud, security, data and AI.
  • Promote a culture of innovation, diversity, and continuous learning by sponsoring hack days, proof-of-concept funding, and partnerships with universities or external research groups.
  • Balance short-term delivery demands with long-term platform investment, maintaining a roadmap backlog for technical debt repayment and sustainable engineering velocity.
  • Ensure accessibility, privacy-by-design, and inclusive product engineering practices are embedded within development lifecycles to meet user and regulatory expectations.
  • Oversee platform scalability and capacity planning to support growth forecasts, seasonal spikes, and geographic expansion while managing latency and compliance constraints.
  • Define and execute a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy, including RTO/RPO targets, backup validation, and periodic failover exercises.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Act as an escalation point for complex technical issues and cross-team conflicts, enabling rapid resolution and knowledge sharing.
  • Represent technology at customer, investor, and partner meetings to articulate product capabilities, roadmap, and technical differentiation.
  • Review and approve major architectural changes, security exceptions, and third-party integrations.
  • Sponsor internal policy development around acceptable use, data retention, and incident disclosure protocols.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP) — hands-on experience designing secure, scalable cloud-native solutions and cloud migration strategies.
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM) and configuration management for reproducible, automated provisioning.
  • Containerization and Orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/GKE/AKS) for microservices and platform deployments.
  • CI/CD and DevOps Tooling (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD) with automated testing and release pipelines.
  • Observability and Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry) for system health and performance analytics.
  • Security & Compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, GDPR, CCPA) and practices including IAM, encryption, vulnerability management, and penetration testing.
  • API design and integration (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ) for reliable inter-service communication.
  • Data platforms and analytics (data lakes, warehouses, Snowflake/Redshift/BigQuery, ETL/ELT) and experience enabling self-service analytics.
  • Software architecture patterns (microservices, domain-driven design, event sourcing) and experience managing technical debt.
  • Database technologies: relational (Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), and experience with scaling and replication strategies.
  • Performance engineering (profiling, load testing, caching strategies, CDN) and capacity planning to meet SLAs.
  • Automation and scripting (Python, Go, Bash) for tooling, deployment automation, and operational tasks.
  • AI/ML and LLM familiarity — practical understanding of ML model lifecycle, model ops, and responsible AI considerations (optional but highly valued).
  • Cost optimization and FinOps practices, cloud billing analysis, and procurement controls.
  • Vendor & Contract Management with experience negotiating SaaS and enterprise agreements.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic leadership — ability to translate business strategy into technical roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
  • Clear, executive-level communication — present technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and Boards.
  • Stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration with Product, Finance, Security, and Operations.
  • People management and talent development — coaching, recruiting, and building diverse high-performing teams.
  • Decision-making under uncertainty — prioritize investments, trade-offs, and risk mitigation.
  • Change management and organizational influence to drive adoption of new tools and processes.
  • Problem solving and systems thinking — identify root causes and design resilient systems.
  • Negotiation and vendor influence — drive favorable commercial and service outcomes.
  • Time and project prioritization in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
  • Customer empathy and product orientation — align technology execution with customer needs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MS/MA) in a technical discipline or an MBA for combined technical/business leadership roles.
  • Professional or industry certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Certified Scrum Leader, CISSP, PMP) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Information Systems / IT Management
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Applied Mathematics / Data Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 10–15+ years of progressive technology experience with at least 5 years in senior engineering or technology leadership roles managing large teams, multi-disciplinary functions, and enterprise-scale systems.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrated success delivering complex technical transformations, cloud migrations, or platform builds at scale.
  • Experience owning P&L or technology budgets, vendor portfolios, and cross-functional programs.
  • Prior exposure to regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) or high-security environments is highly desirable.
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