Senior Director, Engineering - AI-First SaaS Product Leadership

Company Overview

NIQ stands as a global leader in consumer intelligence, delivering comprehensive insights into consumer purchasing behaviors and unveiling new growth opportunities. The company merged with GfK in 2023, uniting two foremost industry players with extensive worldwide reach. NIQ offers advanced analytics and platform technology to present the Full View™ of retail and consumer data.

Role Summary

The Senior Director of Engineering at NIQ will spearhead the AI-driven transformation of customer-facing SaaS product engineering. This leadership position demands deep technical expertise, capable of guiding engineering excellence and crafting scalable, dependable product outcomes within a large matrixed, global environment. This role pairs strong software engineering foundations with strategic influence across senior engineering and cross-functional teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the progression from mature SaaS product engineering toward an AI-first model to advance innovation in workflows, decision-making, automation, and insight delivery.
• Leverage Generative AI technologies and AI-assisted practices to elevate software development lifecycle efficiency, developer productivity, quality, testing, documentation, and system modernization.
• Collaborate with product, architecture, security, privacy, data governance, and responsible AI teams to ensure AI capabilities align with enterprise standards.
• Define and communicate the technical roadmap in harmony with product and business objectives, emphasizing system design and architecture leadership.
• Challenge current technical methodologies to enhance system scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, performance, cost-effectiveness, and overall customer value.
• Oversee delivery outcomes across complex SaaS product lines, balancing new AI feature development with modernization and technical debt management.
• Promote robust engineering operations including CI/CD, test automation, observability, incident analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Build leadership capacity by mentoring directors, principal engineers, and senior managers, fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, and continuous learning within globally distributed teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• At least 15 years of technology and software engineering leadership experience, including managing senior technical leaders.
• Established track record in leading engineering for enterprise SaaS, data-centric platforms, analytics products, or comparable large-scale software systems.
• Experience with SaaS transformation, technical debt reduction, quality enhancement, and accelerating delivery timelines.
• Practical know-how in integrating AI and GenAI tools to improve product capabilities and engineering productivity.
• Expertise in system design, distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, scalable API development, and enterprise architecture principles.
• Familiarity with modern software development best practices such as Agile methodologies, CI/CD, automated testing, and secure engineering operations.
• Hands-on or leadership experience with technologies like Java, Python, Angular, Azure cloud, and AI frameworks.
• Superior communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences effectively.

Preferred Experience

• Leading AI-driven product transformation initiatives with clear commercial or customer impact.
• Knowledge of AI orchestration, model integration, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, or AI-powered analytics experiences.
• Background in retail, consumer packaged goods, market intelligence, or data-rich enterprise sectors.

Success Indicators

• Delivery of AI-enabled product features demonstrating measurable customer value and strong engineering foundations.
• Adoption of GenAI-assisted engineering practices enhancing delivery speed, quality, and developer efficiency.
• Modernization of mature SaaS systems without sacrificing reliability or customer commitments.
• Clear, well-documented architectural decisions aligned with long-term strategic goals.
• Elevated leadership capabilities within engineering teams, promoting ownership and technical excellence.

Additional Information

• Flexible working environment supporting remote engagement.
• Volunteer time off opportunities.
• Access to LinkedIn Learning resources.
• Employee Assistance Program available.

NIQ utilizes AI tools in recruiting processes to enhance efficiency and maintain fair evaluations, with final employment decisions made by humans. NIQ is committed to transparent, inclusive, and compliant AI usage policies.