Executive Director, Engineering - AA

Overview

As an Executive Director of Engineering, you will lead multiple engineering teams through a layer of engineering management, reporting to senior technology leadership and partnering closely with cross-functional stakeholders across the business. You will be responsible for delivering scalable backend platforms, data services, and data products that address critical business and technical challenges.

This role requires a strong blend of strategic leadership, technical depth, organizational design, and operational excellence. You will set direction, empower engineering managers, drive execution across a portfolio of initiatives, and ensure your organization consistently delivers secure, reliable, and high-quality solutions aligned with company goals.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery, execution, and outcomes across multiple engineering teams, ensuring alignment to organizational objectives, key results, and business priorities.
• Lead and develop engineering managers, enabling them to effectively run their teams, grow their people, and deliver high-impact results.
• Build a high-performing engineering organization by driving clarity of accountability, strong operating rhythms, talent development, and a culture of continuous improvement.
• Partner closely with product, architecture, data, security, and business stakeholders to shape strategy, define roadmaps, and translate priorities into executable plans.
• Oversee the design, development, and operation of backend data services, APIs, pipelines, and data products, ensuring scalability, reliability, maintainability, and performance.
• Drive technical and architectural decision-making in partnership with architects and senior engineers, ensuring solutions align with enterprise standards and long-term business needs.
• Establish and improve engineering processes across planning, estimation, prioritization, execution, dependency management, and release delivery.
• Ensure visibility into portfolio health through clear communication of plans, risks, milestones, status, and outcomes to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Champion engineering excellence by promoting modern software development practices, code quality, test automation, observability, incident management, and operational readiness.
• Oversee production reliability through effective monitoring, logging, alerting, and response processes, ensuring teams proactively identify and resolve issues.
• Ensure strong data governance and engineering discipline across systems, including data quality, security, privacy, and compliance with applicable standards and regulations.
• Partner with leadership on organizational planning, staffing strategy, succession planning, and resource allocation across teams and priorities.
• Coach leaders and teams through change, helping the organization scale effectively while maintaining engagement, accountability, and delivery momentum.
• Stay current on industry trends, emerging technologies, and engineering best practices, and drive thoughtful adoption where it creates business value.

Required Experience & Skills

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including strong depth in backend and data engineering domains such as APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform infrastructure.
• 4+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing engineering managers and leading multiple teams or functional areas.
• Proven experience building and scaling high-performing engineering organizations, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and leadership development.
• Demonstrated success leading complex technical programs across multiple teams, with accountability for delivery, resource planning, and business outcomes.
• Strong experience developing production-grade applications using technologies such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js.
• Experience designing and scaling data APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed architectures.
• Deep understanding of data engineering concepts including data warehousing, data pipelines, data integration, and data product development.
• Strong working knowledge of SQL and NoSQL technologies such as PostgreSQL, Snowflake, and DynamoDB.
• Experience with cloud-native platforms and modern engineering tooling, including AWS, Git, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies such as Lambda, SQS, and SNS.
• Experience establishing strong engineering quality practices, including unit, integration, end-to-end, load, and security testing strategies.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across technical and business functions and translate complex concepts into clear decisions and action.
• Strong operational leadership skills, including incident management, reliability practices, and service ownership.
• Demonstrated ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on technical judgment and pragmatic execution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with technologies such as NestJS, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, DynamoDB, Kafka, Fivetran, dbt, Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes, Datadog, and PagerDuty.
• Experience leading platform, data, or backend engineering organizations in fast-paced, product-driven environments.
• Familiarity with governance, compliance, and security considerations in regulated environments.
• Experience driving organizational transformation, engineering maturity, and platform modernization initiatives.

Applicable only to applicants applying to a position in any location with pay disclosure requirements under state or local law: ​

• The compensation range described below is the range of possible base pay compensation that the Company believes in good faith it will pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual compensation paid within this range will depend on many factors including geographic location, and we may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. ​

• We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off (vacation, holidays, sick), medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.​

• This job is eligible to participate in our long-term incentive programs. ​

Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, incentive, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole and absolute discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole and absolute discretion, consistent with applicable law.​

AbbVie is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to operating with integrity, driving innovation, transforming lives and serving our community.  Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled.

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