Senior Director, Product & Engineering - Finance & Risk

About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Director of Digital Product Engineering to lead high-performing engineering, product, design, and technology delivery teams. Lead technology delivery for the Finance and Risk function and maintain a strategic roadmap, align product, engineering, and business teams around releases. Work with cross-functional leaders on strategy and vision through building, shipping, and maintaining our digital products.

This area is beginning a significant multi-year transformation, and the leader will be responsible for driving and executing technology and data transformation within this function.

This role leads teams responsible for technology capabilities in Controller, Finance and Planning Analytics, Sourcing and Procurement, Enterprise Risk Management, Audit, and Antifraud areas. This is a cross-functional role where the engineering and product teams directly report into them.

This role will work closely with business stakeholders and enterprise technology partners to understand critical data and analytical challenges and opportunities. Establish Finance and Risk Data platform by applying in-depth knowledge of data domains, cloud data and application technologies, architectural patterns, frameworks, and tooling to meet Finance and Risk business area's data and analytics needs. Adept at building strong relationships across Finance and Risk business organizations and enterprise technology partners.

The key responsibility of this role is to lead the Finance Transformation initiative. This modernization will facilitate the replacement of several vendor applications, including PeopleSoft, the expense management system, and various reporting platforms. The new platform will be crucial for the future capabilities of the Controller's Office, as well as for Financial Planning, Actuarial Services, Enterprise Risk Management, and Audit functions.

What You'll Do

• Vision: Sets the long-term 5-year technology vision for Finance and Risk technology and data capabilities including vendor implementation and integrations across business. This includes product and engineering vision, roadmap to sequence and achieve incremental impactful business outcomes over time.

• Leadership: Leads the Finance and Risk technology and its implementation to deliver Finance and Risk technology and data/analytics platform to enable applications, data, analytics, and reporting needs across FRF business.

• Stakeholder Management: Collaborates with the business to understand business drivers, strategy, and critical business outcomes for the Finance and Risk business. Establishes business-aligned goals and leads the team to meet the objectives. Ability to channel challenging teams, interpersonal conflicts, and cross-departmental political initiatives into opportunities.

• Technical leadership: Provides hands-on technical leadership to drive the execution of the future state technology and data vision to delivery. Demonstrates ability to dive deep into Finance and Risk data technology solutions, data systems architecture, and Data Governance tooling.

• Talent and Development: Leads the talent strategy and development of the team. Responsible for hiring, coaching, mentoring the group, and developing cross functional engineering leaders.

• Culture: Build a high-performing culture and embraces NM's behaviors in bringing the best out of people. Leads with enterprise vision.

• Drive: Drives high performing teams and can lead with expertise, energy and empathy.

• Defines the Product: Identifies and validates problems and/or opportunities for multiple user groups/scenarios across the company.

• Prioritization: Sets long term goals for both the product portfolio and team members.

• Manages budgets for optimal business results

• Demonstrates a strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive and instills these behaviors within the team.

• Acts as an ambassador and representative for Northwestern Mutual's technology organization in community and technology events.

What You'll Bring to the Role

• Must have 15+ years of professional experience in Application development & programming across multiple languages, frameworks, Solution architecture, implementing large-scale distributed technology and data solutions (on-prem and cloud), and vendor implementations, customizations, integrations in financial services.

• Business Acumen: Has a deep understanding of the Finance and Risk areas not limited to technology.

• Must have experience in leading through multiple engineering teams and their respective leads.

• Experience in ERP and EPM implementations and key industry platforms in this space (SAP, Oracle, Workday, Anaplan, PeopleSoft etc.)

• Must have 5+ years of combined experience leading engineering and product teams.

• Must have 5+ years of experience managing managers.

• Must have a product-focused mindset and start-up spirit to execute and deliver business outcomes-experience with earning trust and growing business relationships.

• Must have experience creating data strategy and dealing with challenges during its rollout to achieve business outcomes.

• Significant production experience working with DataMesh, DataLake, Data warehousing, and cloud data technologies (Snowflake, Databricks etc.) in the financial services.

• Strong understanding and hands-on experience with various architecture concepts, application design, cloud data and application technologies, CI/CD, Containerization, deployment technologies, API development, Microservices architecture, and BI Tools. Experience with PowerBI or reporting tooling strategy is a plus

• Experience providing direct constructive feedback and conducting periodic performance reviews for the team.

• Ability to learn and teach others and employs an organic approach to upskill broader organization.

• Can influence technology or business leaders on impactful issues and decisions. Takes pride in bringing people together for a higher purpose despite ambiguity and organizational boundaries.

• Strong communication skills at all levels (verbal and written). Ability to successfully communicate to technical and non-technical audiences in varying forms and all levels of detail.

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience

#LI-Hybrid

Compensation Range:

Pay Range - Start:
$171,500.00

Pay Range - End:
$318,500.00

Geographic Specific Pay Structure:

Structure 110:
$188,650.00 USD - $350,350.00 USD

Structure 115:

$197,260.00 USD - $366,340.00 USD

We believe in fairness and transparency. It's why we share the salary range for most of our roles. However, final salaries are based on a number of factors, including the skills and experience of the candidate; the current market; location of the candidate; and other factors uncovered in the hiring process. The standard pay structure is listed but if you're living in California, New York City or other eligible location, geographic specific pay structures, compensation and benefits could be applicable, click here to learn more.

Grow your career with a best-in-class company that puts our clients' interests at the center of all we do. Get started now!

Northwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer who welcomes and encourages diversity in the workforce. We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.