Senior Director, Engineering

About the Role

Shutterfly is looking for a Senior Director, Engineering to shape the future of AI‑driven personalized commerce. You will lead the engineering strategy, execution, and culture for a secure, scalable, and intelligent next‑generation platform. The role oversees a portfolio of platform teams spanning Identity, Photos, AI, Personalization, and Marketing engineering, creating a unified intelligence layer that powers every customer interaction. You will harness billions of photos and petabytes of data to drive personalization across the live website, mobile apps, and offsite channels such as emails, extending photo‑centric personalization to the entire consumer journey.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the long‑term technical strategy and architectural roadmap for Shutterfly’s Photos Platform, AI, Personalization, Marketing engineering, and Identity platforms, ensuring security, scalability, and extensibility are built in by design.
• Develop a collaborative and inclusive high‑performance team that fosters a culture of ownership, experimentation, and innovation to prioritize high‑impact work and deliver working solutions for customers.
• Deliver on AI‑driven business KPIs including personalization lift, conversion improvement, engagement growth, automated product creation adoption, and marketing performance optimization.
• Define and execute the AI platform strategy, covering model lifecycle management, experimentation frameworks, model observability, and responsible AI practices.
• Lead development of scalable AI systems for photos, generative content creation, and real‑time personalization across web, mobile, and marketing channels.
• Establish rigorous experimentation and evaluation frameworks to validate AI‑driven customer experiences and optimize for measurable business impact.
• Build reusable AI and data platform capabilities (feature stores, training pipelines, model monitoring systems) to support multiple consumer‑facing applications.
• Drive adoption of AI‑enabled development practices and automation to increase engineering productivity and accelerate innovation.
• Own end‑to‑end engineering delivery of platform capabilities by partnering with product, UX, and business leaders; represent the technology function in C‑suite discussions to align priorities and outcomes.
• Provide architectural leadership and technical oversight across platform teams to ensure scalable, resilient, and high‑performance systems, driving execution from product vision through delivery.
• Measure success through customer experience improvements, platform reliability (SLOs), delivery velocity, cost efficiency, and AI‑enabled productivity gains.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in engineering leadership with a track record of building and leading high‑performing global engineering organizations.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams that build and operate AI/ML systems in production, including experience with model training, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring at scale.
• Experience building personalization, recommendation, ranking, or generative AI systems in consumer‑facing applications.
• Proven experience architecting and delivering highly available, scalable, and low‑latency systems for high‑traffic applications.
• Demonstrated success leading end‑to‑end engineering delivery of large‑scale systems across distributed teams.
• Strong technical expertise across architecture, system design, cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), and modern development practices.
• Familiarity with modern MLOps practices, experimentation platforms, and large‑scale data processing systems.
• Experience defining and implementing AI and automation strategies that drive measurable business and productivity outcomes.
• Deep understanding of secure software development lifecycle (SDL), Shift‑Left principles, and vulnerability management.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence at all levels—from engineers to executives.
• Strong business and product orientation, with the ability to balance innovation, execution, and operational rigor.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; advanced technical degree preferred.