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Director Product Engineering

Durham, NC 27703

Posted: 02/08/2026 Industry: IT Functional Job Number: 40060 Work Location: Onsite

Job Description

Job Title: Director Product Engineering
Type: Direct Hire
Work Location: Onsite position in Durham, NC
USC/GC holder (no 3rd party; no sponsorship available)

Job Overview:

Our client is seeking a Director of Production Engineering to own the engineering systems that make reliability, performance, correctness, and release safety predictable across our global POS, edge, cloud, and middleware platform.

This is a production engineering leadership role focused on distributed system correctness, resilience, and performance engineering. You will partner closely with existing SRE and Operations leaders, but your charter is to engineer prevention by building production readiness standards, automated release gates, and performance/resilience validation mechanisms that stop unsafe changes before they ship.

As AI accelerates development velocity, the bottleneck shifts from writing code to verifying correctness, performance, and safe behavior under failure. This role builds the production engineering foundation that allows teams to move fast without degrading latency, throughput, or availability.

Essential Job Responsibilities:

Production Engineering & Release Safety
  • Own non-functional release criteria and automated release gates for reliability, resilience, performance, and correctness across complex release trains.
  • Define and enforce Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs) and platform-wide engineering standards.
  • Establish objective, measurable “safe-to-release” signals consumed by CI/CD and release tooling.
Distributed Systems Correctness (Edge ? Cloud Commerce)
  • Partner with Architects and Principal Engineers to define failure modes, degradation behavior, and system guardrails for distributed and eventually consistent workflows.
  • Ensure systems behave correctly during retries, partial outages, intermittent connectivity, degraded modes, and recovery.
  • Lead engineering initiatives that reduce risk of data loss, duplication, corruption, or inconsistent state across POS, middleware, and cloud services.
Incident Learning That Prevents Recurrence
  • Lead blameless incident reviews using formal analysis methods.
  • Ensure corrective actions are engineered into systems, validated, tracked, and audited.
  • Institutionalize learning so failures do not reappear under new conditions or scale.
Resilience & Performance Engineering
  • Own platform-level strategies for resilience, performance, and scalability validation.
  • Drive chaos, failover, load, stress, and soak testing focused on real failure modes, not synthetic demos.
  • Validate store-mode behavior, payment workflows, edge-device dependencies, and multi-service interactions.
Observability & Reliability Signals
  • Ensure high-fidelity telemetry (logs, metrics, traces, and business signals) that supports release gating, correctness verification, and diagnosis.
  • Drive instrumentation standards that allow teams to prove reliability outcomes with data.
Cross-Org Technical Leadership
  • Partner with Software Engineering, Architecture, Quality Engineering, Cloud Operations, and TPM/TPO teams.
  • Build and lead senior technical managers and staff-level engineers.
  • Set expectations for technical depth, ownership, and execution quality.

Required Skills & Experience:
 
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
  • 10–15+ years building production engineering capabilities for distributed software platforms, with direct accountability for production outcomes.
  • Demonstrated experience defining and enforcing production readiness standards and non-functional release gates that prevent unsafe changes from shipping.
  • Proven ability to lead formal root-cause / reliability analysis and ensure systemic fixes reduce recurrence.
  • Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including the ability to reason about:
  • Failure modes and degradation behavior
  • Dependency risk, retries, and backpressure
  • Consistency tradeoffs and correctness under failure
  • Experience partnering deeply with Architecture and Software Engineering to embed reliability guardrails into design reviews, CI/CD pipelines, and system standards.
  • Senior leadership experience building teams and influencing across large engineering organizations.

Big Bonus Points if you Have:
 
  • Retail POS, payments, edge devices, or store environments.
  • Designing reliability automation (release scoring, regression detection, incident pattern analysis).
  • Hybrid cloud + edge architectures; Kubernetes/AKS; modern observability platforms.
  • Leading reliability transformations in large, complex engineering organizations.

Job Requisition # 40060
#LI- DK1


A reasonable estimate of the Base Salary for this role is $215,000 - $255,000 per year. The disclosed pay range estimate has not been adjusted for the applicable geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled.  The compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case, such as skills and experience levels.

 

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About Durham, NC

Ready to embark on your next career adventure? Explore our job opportunities in and around Durham, North Carolina, a vibrant city nestled in the heart of the Research Triangle. Known for its booming tech industry, top universities like Duke and UNC Chapel Hill, and a thriving arts scene, Durham offers an inviting blend of Southern charm and innovation. Imagine working just minutes away from the stunning Duke Gardens, catching a show at the Carolina Theatre, or cheering on the Durham Bulls baseball team at the historic Durham Bulls Athletic Park. With its culinary delights, including top-notch BBQ joints and food trucks, along with easy access to outdoor activities at the Eno River State Park, Durham promises a fulfilling work-life balance for those seeking new career opportunities. Explore our listings today and discover why Durham is the perfect place to grow your career.
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