Vice President, Engineering

Vice President of Engineering

This is a hybrid role to be based near one of our offices in New York City, Austin or Los Angeles.

About Material

We drive intelligent growth for ambitious businesses and leading brands. Customer understanding is more potent and drives greater value when insights go to work directly within marketing and experience priorities. To give our clients that advantage, we put an insights-driven operating system at the core of our design, go-to-market and digital experience solutions. Material clients make smarter growth choices because they can see clearly how and when to take the shots that count. Together, we connect consumer intelligence with customer demand generation to build lasting, profitable relationships.

Material is a leading research and insights company helping the world's most recognizable brands make smarter, faster decisions. We combine proprietary data infrastructure, advanced analytics, and AI-driven methodologies to deliver research at scale. Our engineering organization is the backbone of this mission — building the platforms, pipelines, and products that power how insights are collected, processed, and delivered to clients worldwide.

About the Role

The VP of Engineering is a senior leadership role responsible for the full engineering organization at Material, spanning software, data, AI/ML, solutions architecture, product, design, QA, and insights operations. Reporting to executive leadership, you will own the technical strategy, org design, delivery model, and engineering culture across a multi-cluster team operating across multiple time zones — including offshore engineering talent.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will shape how we build, scale, and modernize our core platforms — from survey data collection and processing pipelines to AI-powered reporting tools and client-facing solutions — while simultaneously building the operational model that makes our engineering teams more effective at every level.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Define and evolve the technical architecture across data, software, AI/ML, and infrastructure layers — with particular emphasis on cloud-native and lakehouse patterns (medallion architecture, parallelism, datalake)
• Lead modernization efforts to retire and replace legacy applications and tech stacks with scalable, maintainable alternatives
• Maintain a forward-looking product and infrastructure roadmap, balancing innovation initiatives against operational reliability and delivery commitments
• Champion Infrastructure-as-Code practices (Terraform, AWS CDK) and platform engineering standards across all engineering clusters

Engineering Leadership & Org Design

• Lead and develop a cross-functional engineering organization structured around delivery clusters, including Technical Product Leads, senior engineers, and offshore pod teams
• Hire, develop, and retain top engineering talent; define role frameworks, competency ladders, and technical career paths
• Foster a high-accountability, delivery-focused engineering culture grounded in clear ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement
• Manage distributed teams across multiple timezones, ensuring effective communication, alignment, and productivity across offshore and onshore resources

Product & Business Alignment

• Partner with operations and business leadership to translate ambiguous business requirements into well-scoped engineering initiatives
• Work closely with product and project managers to maintain a prioritized, resourced backlog that balances client commitments, internal tooling, and strategic modernization
• Serve as the primary technical voice in executive discussions, providing clear signal on feasibility, tradeoffs, capacity, and risk
• Define and uphold integration contracts and delivery standards between engineering clusters and adjacent operational functions

Delivery & Operations

• Own engineering delivery health: velocity, quality, incident response, and continuous improvement rituals across all teams
• Establish/Evolve standards across workflow management (Jira, Confluence), data orchestration, and QA
• Drive adoption of AI/ML capabilities across both internal tooling and client-facing product features
• Oversee vendor relationships, licensing decisions, and build-vs-buy evaluations for platform tooling and infrastructure services

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of combined experience in Data, Software, and Product Development, with at least 4 years in senior engineering leadership
• Multi-cloud expertise across AWS, GCP, and Azure — with the ability to evaluate tradeoffs and select the right platform for each workload
• Infrastructure-as-Code proficiency with Terraform and/or AWS CDK
• Cross-functional team leadership across multiple time zones, including offshore engineering teams
• Business requirements translation — proven track record triaging with operations and engineering leaders, working in lockstep with product/project managers on prioritization and resourcing
• Advanced Snowflake experience including performance optimization, data sharing, and exposure to AI/ML services (Cortex, Snowpark)
• Broad engineering fluency across data engineering, software engineering, AI/ML, UI/UX, and QA — able to credibly engage with practitioners across all disciplines
• Legacy modernization leadership — experience assessing, sequencing, and communicating large-scale platform migrations to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice-to-Have Qualifications:

Data & Analytics Platforms

• Lakehouse architecture experience with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or equivalent open table formats
• Survey/research platform familiarity — Dimensions, Unicom Intelligence, or comparable platforms
• Identity resolution and data governance — deduplication, consent frameworks, and PII handling at scale

AI/ML & Emerging Technology

• AI agent development — experience architecting or overseeing agentic workflow systems
• Synthetic research or behavioral data pipelines in a research or insights context
• Fraud detection, statistical weighting, and automated testing integrated into data products

Cloud & Infrastructure Depth

• AWS service depth — Step Functions, Lambda, EMR, ECS, Athena, Zero-ETL, S3-based lakehouse patterns

Leadership & Business

• Research, insights, or data-as-a-service business context experience
• Budget ownership — headcount planning, vendor negotiation, and CapEx/OpEx tradeoffs
• Hiring infrastructure — building assessments, job descriptions, and interview frameworks for mid-to-senior engineering roles
• Executive communication — comfortable presenting technical strategy to C-suite and board-level stakeholders

Why work for Material?

• Material is a global company and we work with best-of-class brands worldwide. We also create and launch new brands and products, putting innovation and value creation at the center of our practice. Our clients are in the top of their class, across industry sectors from technology to retail, transportation, finance and healthcare.
• Material employees join a peer group of exceptionally talented colleagues across the company, the country, and even the world. We develop capabilities, craft and leading-edge market offerings across seven global practices including strategy and insights, design, data & analytics, technology and tracking. Our engagement management team makes it all hum for clients.
• A community focused on learning and making an impact. Material is an outcomes focused company. We create experiences that matter, create new value and make a difference in our clients' lives and their customers' lives.

Pay Range: $180,000.00 – $240,000.00

The range shown represents a grouping of relevant ranges currently in use at Material. Actual range for this position may differ, depending on location and specific skillset required for the work itself.

Equal Employment Opportunity

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other factors prohibited by law.

Privacy Statement

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