Sr. Director Licensing and Accounts

Senior Director, Licensing & Accounts Engineering

About the Role

A highly scaled, global technology organization is seeking a Senior Director of Licensing & Accounts Engineering to lead the transformation of critical backend platforms that support customer accounts, licensing, access, and entitlement systems.

This role sits at the center of a complex product ecosystem and will own the technical roadmap for systems that determine customer identity, account access, licensing rules, and product entitlements across multiple products and services.

The ideal candidate is a deeply technical engineering leader with strong backend architecture experience, especially in Java-based systems, shared services, integrations, and legacy platform modernization. This person must be able to simplify highly complex systems, influence senior technical stakeholders, and lead a critical engineering group through transformation.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and modernization strategy for licensing and account platforms.
• Lead transformation of multiple critical Java backend components.
• Simplify complex integrations across product lines, customer-facing systems, and internal platforms.
• Design scalable and reusable licensing, account, and entitlement frameworks.
• Establish and drive a long-term technical roadmap for backend shared services.
• Partner closely with product, architecture, and engineering leaders on strategy and execution.
• Guide design decisions to reduce system coupling and improve platform reuse.
• Provide technical leadership, architectural review, and mentorship to senior engineers.
• Lead and develop a mid-sized engineering organization supporting highly critical systems.
• Act as a change agent by challenging legacy systems, assumptions, and technical practices.

Ideal Background

• Senior engineering leadership experience in backend platform, shared services, account systems, licensing, entitlement, identity, or large-scale product infrastructure.
• Strong Java/backend systems expertise.
• Experience modernizing complex legacy systems.
• Background leading integration-heavy architectures across multiple products or business units.
• Experience managing and influencing teams of approximately 20–25+ engineers.
• Ability to define technical roadmaps and drive architectural simplification.
• Strong balance of hands-on technical credibility and senior leadership presence.

Must-Have Skills

• Java backend systems
• Platform architecture and modernization
• Licensing, accounts, entitlements, identity, or shared services experience
• Complex integration architecture
• Technical roadmap ownership
• Experience simplifying legacy systems
• Leadership of senior engineers and engineering managers
• Strong cross-functional influence

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Licensing and entitlement platform experience
• Customer account platform experience
• Reusable platform/service framework design
• Cloud modernization experience
• Experience with legally or commercially constrained systems
• High-scale consumer or SaaS platform experience

What Success Looks Like

In the first 6–12 months, this leader will be expected to:

• Define a clear modernization roadmap for licensing and account platforms.
• Reduce system complexity and redundant integration points.
• Improve scalability and reusability across backend services.
• Strengthen technical ownership across the engineering team.
• Build trust with product, architecture, and executive stakeholders.
• Establish a more future-ready platform foundation.

Compensation & Location

• Base salary: $230,000–$280,000 , with some flexibility
• Annual bonus: 30%
• Equity: RSUs, flexible depending on candidate level
• Total compensation: approximately $500,000 at the top end
• Location: Mountain View, CA preferred; Tempe, AZ may also be considered
• Hybrid expectation: minimum 3 days/week onsite, ideally 4–5 days