Senior Director, Engineering

• Partner closely with the CTO and engineering leaders to shape engineering strategy and technical direction
• Lead and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, supporting accountability and a healthy culture
• Develop and retain strong talent and hire thoughtfully as needs evolve
• Strengthen planning, delivery, quality, and reliability
• Help teams make faster decisions, move ideas into products, spot risks, and escape issues early
• Partner with Product, Design, Newsroom, and business leaders to turn priorities into technical plans and align engineering capacity with important work
• Guide architecture, platforms, and reliability decisions, especially across teams
• Own operating standards, guidelines, and practices for planning, building, testing, releasing, operating, and learning
• Establish shared benchmarks and baselines for engineering health
• Lead vendor evaluation and selection for engineering tools, platforms, and services
• Help define engineering leadership and how Axios builds, learns, and delivers as an AI-native media company

Requirements

• Experience leading and developing engineering managers and senior technical leaders
• Experience setting clear expectations and addressing performance directly
• Experience helping teams use AI to improve how they build, test, and operate software and experiment with new product capabilities
• Ability to translate technical details for executives and nontechnical partners
• Ability to engage deeply with engineers on technical and architectural questions
• Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar areas, ask the right questions, and determine when to bring in expertise, invest in platforms, simplify systems, or accept short-term tradeoffs
• Ideally, experience leading teams responsible for high-traffic digital products and the platforms behind them
• Strong vision for how AI and technology will change engineering practices, product development, platforms, and internal workflows
• Willingness to actively develop AI literacy and use AI tools to enhance productivity, creativity, and efficiency

Core Competencies

Demonstrates strong leadership in developing engineering managers and technical leaders while fostering a healthy culture. Capable of translating technical details for diverse stakeholders and leveraging AI to enhance engineering practices and product development.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Engineering Leadership
• AI Integration in Software Development
• Technical Strategy Development
• Vendor Evaluation and Selection
• Performance Management

Hard Skills

• Engineering Management
• AI Tools Utilization
• Technical Architecture
• Software Development Lifecycle
• Performance Metrics Establishment

Soft Skills

• Effective Communication
• Team Development
• Decision-Making
• Problem-Solving
• Collaboration

Industry Keywords

• Digital Products
• AI-Native Media
• Engineering Standards
• Product Development
• High-Traffic Platforms

Tools & Technologies

• Engineering Platforms
• Testing Tools
• Release Management Tools
• Project Management Software