How an Engineering Director at Advisor360° Drives Platform Strategy, Execution and Team Growth

Bella Kharit loves building and scaling engineering teams to deliver solutions to customers. But her favorite part of working at AI-powered fintech company Advisor360°? 

Seeing the product come to life. 

“I find weekly and bi-weekly demos extremely rewarding,” Kharit said. “They are a great way to communicate progress and showcase the collaborative work of the engineers from different global locations, providing each other with valuable feedback and an opportunity to take ownership of their work.” 

In her role as the director of engineering at Advisor360°, Kharit focuses on helping a team of 70 engineers level up their technical abilities while mapping out big strategic decisions for the fintech company’s platform. 

Built In spoke with Kharit to see what a day in the life looks like leading the engineering team at Advisor360°. 

Bella Kharit

Director, Engineering • Advisor360

What a Director of Engineering Does at Advisor360°

Describe your role and responsibilities. 

As director of engineering at Advisor360°, I lead a global organization of around 70 software engineering professionals across five multidisciplinary teams. In my role, I drive the execution of high-stakes complex strategic programs that define our competitive edge in the wealth management industry. I build alignment across the company to scale our processes, sharpen our decision-making and uphold a standard of technical excellence. 

Since joining in November 2022, I have focused on cultivating a high-performing engineering culture, mentoring the next generation of leaders and leveraging emerging technologies to solve the industry’s challenges.

A Typical Day in Engineering Leadership at Advisor360°

• 2 hours for cross-functional syncs and strategic alignment: discussions with product, engineering, customer success, sales and other business stakeholders to ensure engineering efforts are tied to the current roadmap, business strategy and operational goals 
• 3-4 hours for high stakes programs execution and delivery sync-ups: deep dives into the status of the complex, high-priority programs; managing risks before they become delays; unblocking team decision-making in ambiguity; technical or operational discussions where a director-level decision is needed to choose between competing priorities or technical decisions; delivery and resource planning 
• 2 hours for talent strategy and culture: dedicated time for mentoring and coaching, sync up with extended staff, review hiring and retention strategies, hiring, orchestrating events that promote culture of engineering innovation
• 2 hours for organizational scaling: one-to-ones with the engineering managers and leads, analysis of current friction points, review and refining of current processes

How Advisor360° Engineering Leaders Drive Cross-Functional Alignment

As director of engineering at Advisor360°, I collaborate across different layers of the organization with an objective to ensure that we are aligned and everyone is moving in the same direction. As such, I collaborate with the engineering peers and cross-functional leads to build alignment and standards across the organization. We collaborate on the big picture issues like global team scaling, or major architectural shifts that affect more than one team, establish operational standards, processes and frameworks — for the way we build and deploy software, hire and grow teams and ensure when engineering teams deliver the rest of business is ready to launch and support. 

I collaborate with the teams in my organization by enabling their autonomy, clearing the roadblocks, ensuring the managers have resources to meet quality expectations, and collaborating on career growth paths. I collaborate with product and executive leadership by translating business strategy into technology delivery plans. I share technical constraints and opportunities that help shape the product roadmap and communicate how the technical investments, like platform modernization, will drive revenue.

Tools and Tech Stack Used by Advisor360° Engineering Teams

We use a plethora of technologies and tools to create, deploy and monitor our systems and keep them running! In my role, my “must haves” are Slack, Atlassian tools and Gemini.

How Engineering Success Is Measured at Advisor360°

Which KPI defines success for your role?

Operationally, I use various metrics to track different aspects of teams’ performance for their velocity, accuracy of the planning, the consistent delivery to production, as well as product quality, security and resilience. 

For instance, we look at the aging of customer reported issues, internally found issues, frequency of production deployments for features, sprints velocity and more. Strategically, the success is defined in collaboration with product and measuring adoption of the features we built, along with teams’ timely execution of the roadmap.

Frequently Asked Questions