Executive Director, Technology

Accountabilities: Technology leadership and team development: Lead and grow the technology organization across engineering, delivery, and operations. Own recruitment, performance management, professional development, team standards, and organizational planning, while developing management capabilities as the function scales. Technical strategy and architecture: Partner with senior leadership to evaluate architectural options, assess build-versus-buy decisions, establish technical priorities, and define the platform's long-term direction. Provide clear technical recommendations, assess trade-offs, and translate strategic decisions into actionable delivery plans. Engineering execution and delivery management: Convert product and business objectives into technical requirements, project scopes, delivery schedules, and measurable outcomes. Manage dependencies, establish delivery cadences, communicate commitments to stakeholders, and maintain visibility into progress, risks, and priorities. Hands-on software development: Contribute production code regularly, lead complex technical investigations, develop prototypes, and resolve challenging engineering problems. Review architectural designs and implementations, establish engineering standards, and introduce quality controls that identify issues before they reach production. Platform and product development: Lead the development and evolution of digital products supporting news publishing, subscriptions, identity management, events, and data services. Manage the transition from legacy platforms to new solutions while ensuring continuity, reliability, and maintainability. Content architecture and data services: Own the underlying content and data infrastructure, including content modeling, content management systems, APIs, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) services. Collaborate with design teams that independently develop and deploy user-facing interfaces, ensuring the underlying systems support consistent and efficient product development. Infrastructure and operational excellence: Oversee cloud infrastructure, development environments, CI/CD pipelines, preview environments, monitoring, logging, and observability. Build reliable deployment processes that enable engineers and designers to release changes safely and efficiently. Security, privacy, and incident management: Establish and maintain security standards across applications, infrastructure, access controls, credentials, dependencies, and third-party services. Lead incident response, evidence preservation, and reporting, while ensuring appropriate privacy, consent, and data-retention practices. Business systems and integrations: Manage internal tools and integrations supporting customer relationship management, subscriptions, email, events, and business operations. Develop services that allow internal teams to access and use organizational data effectively. Vendor and contractor management: Direct external engineering partners and technology vendors, oversee their deliverables, and ensure their work meets internal standards for quality, security, performance, and accountability. AI-enabled development and collaboration: Enable non-engineering colleagues to use AI-assisted tools effectively while maintaining appropriate technical oversight and quality standards. Collaborate with editorial, commercial, product, and design stakeholders to turn business ideas into reliable features at the pace required by a dynamic media environment. Requirements Leadership experience: At least five years of experience leading technical teams, including direct management of engineers and management through other managers. Demonstrated success in hiring, developing, managing performance, making difficult personnel decisions, and maintaining accountability for team outcomes. Hands-on engineering background: A strong track record of writing and shipping production code, with the ability to remain technically engaged while managing a broad technology function. Experience solving complex engineering problems and making sound decisions across application development, backend systems, and infrastructure. Technical and operational leadership: Experience overseeing software delivery, infrastructure operations, vendor relationships, and stakeholder commitments. Ability to manage the full lifecycle from business requirements and technical design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing operations. Programming and application development: Practical expertise with TypeScript, Node.js, modern development tooling, and backend engineering. Experience with Payload CMS and PostgreSQL, or comparable code-first headless content management systems, is highly relevant. APIs and modern web architecture: Strong understanding of content modeling, API design, GraphQL, REST, Next.js, and Astro with React islands. Experience building scalable, maintainable systems that support multiple digital products and interfaces. Cloud and infrastructure: Experience with AWS services, including Lambda, S3, CloudFront, IAM, and RDS, as well as containerized workloads and Kubernetes. Familiarity with infrastructure automation, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and operational reliability is important. Security and compliance: Demonstrated understanding of application security, authentication and authorization, secrets management, dependency security, least-privilege access, asset inventories, credential rotation, incident response, and forensic logging. Knowledge of GDPR, CCPA, consent management, and data-retention requirements is beneficial. Identity, payments, and integrations: Experience with single sign-on and OpenID Connect, identity platforms such as Logto, payment processing through Stripe, subscription entitlements, and paywall logic is advantageous. Additional technical breadth: Familiarity with PHP, MySQL, Python/FastAPI, Elasticsearch, and message brokers is useful, particularly when maintaining or evolving established systems. AI-assisted engineering: Experience incorporating AI tools into software development workflows, with the judgment to evaluate generated code, maintain quality standards, and recognize situations requiring traditional engineering approaches. Strategic judgment and communication: Ability to translate business objectives into practical technical solutions, articulate costs and trade-offs, and communicate effectively with technical teams and non-technical executives. Must be comfortable challenging assumptions constructively, influencing decisions, and committing to agreed priorities. Collaborative engineering culture: Experience working with designers who contribute directly to production code, as well as contractors and external vendors. A background in media, journalism, or digital publishing is a strong advantage but not required. Work location: Must be based in the United States and comfortable working in a fully remote environment. Benefits Total compensation: Approximately $215,000 annually, comprising a base salary of approximately $175,000 and an annual bonus opportunity of approximately $40,000. Remote work flexibility: Fully remote work within the United States, with the flexibility to work from home. Paid time off: Generous annual paid time off, 12 company holidays, and two floating holidays. Medical insurance: The employer covers 70% of medical insurance premiums for employees and eligible spouses or dependents. Dental and vision coverage: Fully paid dental and vision insurance for employees. Life and disability insurance: Employer-paid short-term and long-term disability coverage, $50,000 in basic life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance, and access to an Employee Assistance Program. Additional insurance options: Access to supplemental life, hospital indemnity, critical illness, and accident insurance through a third-party provider. Virtual healthcare: Access to online medical, mental health, nutrition, and dermatology services. Paid family leave: Fully paid primary and secondary caregiver leave for eligible employees following the birth or adoption of a child. Retirement savings: 401(k) matching contributions covering 100% of the first 3% contributed and 50% of the next 2%. Home office equipment: Company-provided laptop, monitor, and additional necessary equipment. Remote work stipend: $75 per month to help cover home internet and phone expenses. Home office allowance: $500 annually to support home office setup and improvements. Employee benefits marketplace: Access to discounted services covering additional insurance, family planning, behavioral health, wellness, pet insurance, and financial well-being. Legal services: Access to a discounted employee legal plan. Collaborative culture: An inclusive and supportive working environment that values diverse perspectives, transparency, mutual respect, and continuous improvement.