Executive Director, Engineering - AA

AbbVie · Remote; Irvine, CA, United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • Posted 2026-09-15
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

Job Description
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.

Qualifications
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

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