Sphera is a leading global provider of enterprise software and services that enables companies to manage and optimize their environmental, health, safety and sustainability. Our mission is to create a safer, more sustainable and productive world.
Sphera is a portfolio company of Blackstone, a U.S.-based alternative asset investment company that focuses on private equity, technology and innovation, and more. Blackstone businesses succeed through strong partnerships, a personalized approach and a commitment to exceptional performance with uncompromising integrity. Sphera and Blackstone are leaders in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) space.
We are guided by our core values of Customer Centricity, Accountability, Bias to Action, Innovation, and Collaboration. These values help us recruit the right talent to join our rapidly expanding team of around the globe. It is important to us that each and every Spherion is not only eager to challenge themselves and knows how to get work done but is an awesome addition to our company culture.
We're hiring a Director of Engineering to build a durable engineering organization for the AI era, not just keep the current roadmap moving. This is a senior leadership role that owns reliability, cost, and how the team experiments with and adopts AI-assisted development, on top of the core work of growing a team and shipping quality software. You will also lead the team through organizational change without losing delivery momentum or morale.
What You'll Own
- AI adoption. Treat AI-assisted development as an ongoing, iterative experiment rather than a one-time rollout: try new practices and tooling deliberately, learn what actually works for your codebase and team, and adjust as the discipline matures. Work in partnership with the organization-wide AI transformation program: adopt shared standards and toolkits, and feed your team's learnings back into them. Keep the team's ability to give AI systems clear, well-structured context as a durable core skill, alongside quality gates and human judgment on anything consequential.
- Team leadership. Build, grow, and retain a strong engineering team, with genuine redundancy so no tool, vendor relationship, or piece of institutional knowledge lives with only one person.
- Cross-team program delivery. Manage complex programs that span multiple teams and solution families, sequencing cross-team dependencies and holding a tight critical path to fixed launch and initial customer delivery dates. Surface schedule risk early, resolve competing priorities across teams, and keep delivery on track when dependencies slip elsewhere.
- Reliability. Set clear ownership, escalation paths, and reliability standards, such as on-call, and incident postmortems, so operational excellence is managed within the team, not dependent on any one person.
- Cost. Own cloud, vendor, and contractor cost accountability as a standing part of everyday engineering decisions, not a periodic report, and partner with Finance on budget and forecasting.
- Change leadership. Lead the team through reorganizations, outsourced augmentation, or acquisitions while keeping delivery steady. Document clean handoffs, in and out of roles, so nothing depends on one person's memory.
- Platform alignment. Partner with Product on release scope and with Platform to keep architecture aligned with the wider technology organization.
What You Bring
- 10+ years in software development, including managing engineering teams of 30 or more in a fast-paced, growing SaaS company, with 2+ years managing through engineering managers and leads.
- Hands-on experience running iterative, evidence-based trials of AI-assisted development practices, and building a team's discipline around giving AI systems clear, well-structured context.
- Experience managing complex, cross-team programs with interdependent workstreams against launch delivery deadlines, including holding other teams accountable to a shared critical path.
- Experience with site reliability practices and working knowledge of FinOps principles.
- Experience leading a team through significant organizational change, including vendor or contractor workforce transitions.
- Strong grounding in agile delivery and core software engineering fundamentals: languages, architecture, data structures, and databases.
Sphera is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all colleagues.
This job description is intended to convey information essential to understanding the scope of the job and the general nature and level of work performed by job holders within this job. This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of qualifications, skills, efforts, duties, responsibilities or working conditions associated with the position.
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