Senior Director, Software Engineering, Data

Job Description

At Nike, we leverage the power of data and technology to serve athletes* around the world. The Data & AI (DAI) team is at the forefront of this mission building scalable, secure, and intelligent platforms that power decision-making and personalised experiences across the Nike ecosystem.

Who Youll Work With

Join us at Nikes India Technology Center (ITC) as a leader in this organization, you will also partner closely with leadership, product managers, architects, principal engineers, and peers across Nikes Global Technology teams and within our DAI team to manage priorities and drive alignment on technical decisions. Your team will be a high-performing group of software engineers that will be looking to you to empower them, remove barriers, and maintain a strong team culture.

What Youll Work On

This role will lead, mentor, and manage multiple engineering squads to deliver software in alignment to cross-functional and multi-year roadmaps and modern industry trends. You will build a culture of trust and innovation, pushing our teams to explore new and emerging technologies and how those can help us deliver business value at scale. Enable continuous transformational changes to accelerate Nikes technical maturity, experimentation, standards, best practices, and developer productivity, while inspiring a rich global engineering culture.

- Lead and scale a team of engineering directors, managers and software engineers responsible for building Nikes next-generation data services platform.
- Drive the design and development of API-first, Tier-1, business-critical data services that are secure, scalable, and resilient.
- Partner with product, architecture, and platform teams to define and execute the technical roadmap for Nikes Lakehouse and Data Mesh strategy.
- Champion best practices in data governance, data pipelines, and platform observability.
- Foster a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
- Collaborate with senior leadership to align engineering initiatives with Nikes broader business and technology goals.
- Align engineering initiatives with broader organizational goals such as modernization, cloud cost optimization, and data governance.

Who We Are Looking For

We are looking for a visionary engineering leader with a passion for building and scaling high-performing software engineering teams. You thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative environment and have a proven track record of delivering scalable and reliable data platforms and services. We are looking for someone that is deeply technical, business-savvy, and customer-obsessed.

This role will need to seamlessly partner and collaborate with our business-facing and internal technology teams and leaders, engineers, architects, and product managers to drive rapid value delivery of reusable, well-architected and highly scalable solutions to modernize Nikes technology landscape. This role will lead, support and develop engineering team members, manage priorities and deliver results across boundaries. The successful candidate is an inclusive and empowering technology leader with a history of building trust, tight partnerships and enabling agile teams to solve technical problems in a product model.

- 18+ years of experience in software development, with a strong foundation in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and data platforms.
- 8+ years of experience leading engineering teams as a manager of managers, with demonstrated success in hiring, mentoring, and growing talent.
- Deep expertise in at least one major cloud platform: AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI.
- Hands-on experience with Databricks, Snowflake, AWS RDS, Azure SQL, or GCP Cloud SQL, Apache Spark and Apache Airflow.
- Strong understanding of Lakehouse architecture, Data Mesh principles, data governance frameworks, and modern data pipelines.
- Proven ability to deliver high-impact, API-first services at scale.
- Strength in strategic thinking and translating strategy to measurable objectives.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Experience working within large organization or scaled Agile methodologies.
- Passion for learning new technologies, patterns, and practices.
- Bachelor&aposs degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience

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