Senior Advisor - Technical Delivery (Java)

Role Overview: We are seeking a highly experienced and visionary Senior or Principal Engineering Manager to lead multiple high-performing engineering teams responsible for developing critical software solutions. This role requires a blend of deep technical expertise, exceptional leadership capabilities, and strategic acumen. The ideal candidate will have a distinguished background in Java and microservices architecture, a proven track record of collaborating with senior product and business leaders, driving complex architectural initiatives, and a passion for leveraging cutting-edge technologies, including Generative AI, to redefine engineering processes and accelerate product delivery. This is a pivotal role that will shape our technical roadmap, foster engineering excellence, and cultivate a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Technical Leadership & Vision:

• Define and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for multiple engineering teams, ensuring alignment with overall business objectives and architectural principles.
• Provide expert-level technical guidance, architectural oversight, and hands-on leadership for complex systems, with a strong focus on Java, microservices, and cloud-native patterns.
• Champion and implement advanced engineering practices (e.g., observability, resilience engineering, chaos engineering, high-scale data processing).
• Influence and contribute significantly to the overall engineering strategy and direction of the organization.
• Evaluate and proactively integrate emerging technologies, particularly Generative AI, to enhance development efficiency, automate processes, and create innovative solutions.

Product & Business Partnership:

• Act as a strategic partner to senior Product Management, business stakeholders, and executive leadership, translating complex business needs into clear, actionable technical strategies and delivery plans.
• Proactively identify opportunities for technological innovation to solve business challenges and create competitive advantages.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration and alignment across product, design, and engineering teams to ensure a cohesive and impactful product delivery lifecycle.
• Architectural & Enterprise Initiative Management:
• Collaborate closely with Principal Architects and Enterprise Architects to design, evolve, and implement scalable, secure, and resilient enterprise-grade architectures.
• Lead large-scale, complex engineering initiatives that span multiple teams or departments, managing dependencies, risks, and stakeholder communication effectively.
• Drive the adoption of architectural standards, patterns, and best practices across the organization.

Organizational & Talent Development:

• Manage, mentor, and develop a group of Engineering Managers and/or multiple senior engineering teams (typically 15+ engineers, potentially including other managers), fostering their professional growth, technical excellence, and career progression.
• Cultivate a high-performance, inclusive, and psychologically safe engineering culture that values innovation, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Drive talent acquisition strategies, conduct senior-level interviews, and actively participate in building out world-class engineering teams.
• Establish clear performance goals, conduct regular performance reviews, and implement development plans.

Operational Excellence & Innovation:

• Oversee the entire software development lifecycle, ensuring adherence to modern agile methodologies, high-quality standards, and timely delivery of complex projects.
• Responsible for the operational health, reliability, performance, and security of critical systems in production.
• Drive initiatives to reduce technical debt, improve system resilience, and optimize operational costs.
• Innovate with Generative AI: Actively explore, prototype, and integrate Gen AI solutions into the development workflow (e.g., intelligent code completion, automated test generation, architecture pattern suggestion, documentation automation) to dramatically improve developer productivity and accelerate time-to-market.

Experiences Required:

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. A Ph.D. or equivalent research experience in AI/ML is a significant plus for the Principal level.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in software development, with at least 5+ years in a leadership role (e.g., Senior Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer, Director of Engineering) managing multiple teams or large, complex programs.
• Demonstrated experience hiring, mentoring, and growing other managers or senior individual contributors.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed systems using Java and microservices architecture.
• Proven track record of influencing product strategy and collaborating effectively with senior business and product leaders.
• Experience driving significant architectural changes and large-scale technical migrations.
• Deep expertise in Java (e.g., Spring Boot, JDK 17+), JVM internals, and advanced performance tuning.
• Mastery of microservices architecture: design patterns, inter-service communication (e.g., gRPC, Kafka), service mesh (e.g., Istio), API gateway management.
• Expertise in cloud-native development and operations on a major cloud platform (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) including serverless, containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and cloud-native databases.
• Strong background in event-driven architectures, stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink), and asynchronous programming.
• Proficiency in database technologies, including relational (e.g., PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (e.g., Cassandra, DynamoDB, MongoDB), and data warehousing solutions.
• Robust understanding of security best practices, data privacy (e.g., HIPAA compliance in healthcare), and compliance within a regulated industry.
• Demonstrable experience with DevOps principles, CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps), and comprehensive observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, New Relic).
• Technical Skills (Highly Desired / Differentiator for Principal EM):
• Direct experience with Generative AI applications and platforms (e.g., OpenAI, Google Bard APIs, LangChain, vector databases) in a software development context. Ability to build prototypes or integrate Gen AI tools into engineering workflows.
• Experience with machine learning engineering (MLOps) principles and platforms.
• Advanced knowledge of distributed systems theory and practice (e.g., consensus algorithms, distributed transactions).
• Leadership & Soft Skills:
• Exceptional executive communication, negotiation, and influencing skills, capable of engaging at all levels of the organization.
• Demonstrated ability to drive cultural change, promote innovation, and build resilient, empowered teams.
• Strategic thinker with the ability to foresee technical challenges and opportunities, translating them into actionable plans.
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Passionate about continuous learning, mentoring, and contributing to the broader engineering community.