Job Description:

Our client is seeking an Executive Vice President of Engineering to serve as the company's top technology and engineering executive, leading all software engineering, quality assurance, and infrastructure operations across a global team. This role reports directly to the President and COO— owning the full technical vision, architecture roadmap, and engineering execution for a cybersecurity and compliance company with more than 4 million customers.

This is at a pivotal inflection point. The company operates two core technology platforms: a next-generation cloud-native platform, Asgard, which underpins expanding product portfolio including CRD and future offerings; and a legacy platform, SAIR, a series of multi-instance applications that serve the company's established acquirer customer base. The EVP of Engineering will own the strategy and execution to continue building on the Asgard platform, drive the consolidation and eventual retirement of legacy SAIR systems, and unify the engineering organization under a single modern operating model.

This is a hands-on executive leadership role. The EVP of Engineering will make critical architecture decisions, reshape the leadership team as needed, drive AI adoption across the full development lifecycle, and build a metrics-driven engineering organization that can give customers and internal stakeholders credible commitments on delivery. They must be equally effective in a boardroom, a customer meeting, and a technical architecture review.

Responsibilities:

Engineering Strategy & Execution:

• Define and execute the technology strategy and multi-year engineering roadmap for, aligned with the company's Predict-to-Prevent cybersecurity and compliance mission and the growth demands of a fast-growing PE-backed business.
• Own all software engineering, quality assurance, DevOps, and infrastructure operations across global teams.
• Lead the continued development of the Asgard Platform — next-generation, cloud-native platform processing 6+ billion events daily — ensuring it scales to support the full product portfolio.
• Drive the strategic consolidation and retirement of the legacy SAIR platform, including transitioning monolithic, multi-instance architectures to modern, scalable designs.

Architecture & Technical Leadership:

• Make critical architectural decisions to decompose legacy systems, establish shared services, and build a modern, extensible platform architecture capable of supporting multi-tenant, multi-product business.
• Lead the full infrastructure consolidation from the current fragmented state across Rackspace, AWS, and GCP onto a unified Google Cloud Platform environment — with detailed migration plans, timelines, resource assignments, and cost targets.
• Establish and enforce architectural standards, technical governance, and design review processes across all engineering teams.
• Evaluate and resolve architectural trade-offs across competing platform needs, including performance at scale, multi-tenancy isolation, compliance requirements, and integration complexity across all product lines.

Quality Assurance & Release Excellence:

• Overhaul quality assurance processes, tooling, and team capabilities to dramatically reduce production defects and stabilize releases.
• Implement modern QA practices including automated testing, CI/CD pipeline quality gates, environment management discipline, and release readiness criteria.
• Establish accountability for quality across the full development lifecycle — from product requirements through engineering, QA, UAT, and deployment.

AI-Driven Engineering Transformation:

• Champion and mandate the adoption of AI tools across the entire development lifecycle — product definition, code generation, code review, testing, deployment, and operational monitoring.
• Assess current AI adoption maturity across teams, establish organization-wide standards, training, and expectations for AI-augmented software development and QA.
• Leverage AI to accelerate legacy platform re-engineering, improve code quality, and reduce cycle times — treating AI fluency as a core competency for every member of the engineering organization.

Engineering Operations & Metrics:

• Build a metrics-driven engineering culture from the ground up. Define and implement KPIs across productivity, quality, velocity, and operational health.
• Institute capacity planning and resource allocation processes that enable credible delivery commitments to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Establish rigorous vendor management and cost optimization discipline.

Process Unification & Agile Transformation:

• Unify the engineering organization under a single, modern development methodology.
• Standardize ways of working, tooling, sprint cadences, and delivery processes to enable resource flexibility across products.

Team Leadership & Organizational Development:

• Assess, restructure, and upgrade the engineering team in areas where required.
• Build, manage, and develop a high-performing global engineering organization with teams across the United States, Europe, India, and other geographies.
• Optimize the balance between full-time employees, contractors, and offshore resources — with particular emphasis on building effective engineering capacity in India while reducing reliance on high-cost individual contractors.
• Create a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous improvement.

Cross-Functional Partnership & Customer Engagement:

• Partner closely with the SVP of Product to ensure tight alignment between product strategy and engineering execution, establishing a collaborative and efficient product-engineering operating rhythm.
• Collaborate effectively with all members of the senior leadership team across sales, customer success, finance, and operations.
• Serve as a customer-facing technical executive — comfortable presenting to enterprise customers and acquirers, participating in customer escalations, and representing technical capabilities and roadmap in business development contexts.
• Provide credible, data-backed delivery timelines to customers who require reliable release schedules for new features and customizations.

Qualifications:

Required:

• 15+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with at least 8 years in senior engineering leadership roles (VP of Engineering, CTO, SVP of Engineering, or equivalent) at technology or SaaS companies.
• Demonstrated success leading engineering organizations of 150+ engineers across multiple geographies, including significant experience managing and scaling teams in India or other offshore locations.
• Deep hands-on architecture experience, including leading large-scale platform modernization efforts — migrating monolithic systems to microservices, decomposing legacy platforms, and building cloud-native architectures from the ground up.
• Proven track record executing major cloud infrastructure migrations and consolidations, with strong preference for Google Cloud Platform experience. Must have led organizations through multi-cloud-to-single-cloud transitions with measurable cost and operational outcomes.
• Expert-level knowledge and practical experience deploying AI and machine learning tools across the software development lifecycle — code generation, automated testing, code review, and operational automation. Must have driven enterprise-wide AI adoption within an engineering organization, not just experimented with it.
• Strong command of agile methodologies at scale, with direct experience transforming organizations from waterfall or hybrid models to fully agile operating models. Experience with SAFe, LeSS, or similar scaled agile frameworks is a plus.
• Track record of building and implementing engineering metrics programs — establishing KPIs for velocity, quality, utilization, and delivery predictability in environments that previously lacked measurement rigor.
• Experience making hard leadership decisions — restructuring teams, upgrading underperforming leaders, and building accountability into engineering culture. Demonstrated ability to assess talent quickly and act decisively.
• Exceptional cross-functional collaboration skills, with a proven ability to partner with Product leadership and work effectively across sales, customer success, and executive teams.
• Executive presence and comfort in customer-facing settings — experience presenting technical roadmaps to enterprise clients, participating in sales engagements, and handling customer escalations with credibility and poise.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Advanced degree (MS, MBA) preferred.

Strongly Preferred:

• Experience in cybersecurity, compliance, or payments/financial technology.
• Experience leading engineering at a company serving both direct customers and channel partners (e.g., acquirers, resellers), with an understanding of the operational complexity of multi-tenant, white-label, or instance-per-customer architectures.
• Familiarity with the operational realities of legacy platform environments — including managing teams responsible for aging infrastructure hosted across multiple providers with minimal documentation.
• Experience leading technology organizations through private equity ownership, M&A integration, or post-acquisition platform consolidation.
• Background in cost optimization and vendor management for infrastructure and SaaS tooling.
• Experience building or overseeing platforms that process high-volume event data at scale (billions of events per day).

Salary: $240,000 - $265,000. Base 25% Bonus Target, plus benefits.  

About Us

Peterson Technology Partners (PTP) is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to creating a transparent, inclusive, and human-centered hiring experience.

For more than 28 years, PTP has operated as one of the top IT staffing and recruiting firms in the USA—built on trust, long-term partnerships, and technical excellence.

Based in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, IL, our team of more than 500 employees and consultants is dedicated to:

• Helping every client make the best hiring decisions possible
• Matching professionals with the right IT jobs and career opportunities

As part of that commitment, we believe in providing clear information about how our hiring technologies work and how your data is used. The following section outlines our AI-assisted interview process and your rights as a candidate.

AI-Assisted Interview Experience (Pete & Gabi – Rebecca):

To provide a consistent, fair, and flexible experience for all candidates, we use AI-assisted tools to support parts of the interview process. This includes our proprietary AI platform Pete & Gabi, which includes AI recruiter Rebecca.

These AI hiring tools help us:

• Transcribe interviews
• Summarize candidate responses
• Generate job-related insights
• Streamline communication and scheduling

Please note that:

• The AI does NOT make hiring decisions; all decisions are made by our human recruiters, hiring managers, or client partners.
• The AI does not evaluate facial expressions, emotions, or physical traits; it is used only to support fairness, consistency, and efficiency.

If you prefer a non-AI interview format, we will gladly provide an alternative.