Director, Engineering - ERP

QAD is a leading provider of ERP solutions purpose-built for manufacturing industries — automotive, life sciences, food & beverage, high tech, and industrial. Serving thousands of global manufacturers, QAD's Adaptive Manufacturing Cloud helps companies operate with greater precision, agility, and intelligence.

Enterprise software is entering a third era. The first gave manufacturers a System of Record — ERP that answered 'what do we have and what did we commit to?' The second gave them Data Infrastructure — the ability to move, analyse, and query that data at scale. The third era is domain-specific intelligence: AI agents that can act autonomously on manufacturing data, but only if that data has been given the context, relationships, and governed rules that allow an agent to reason correctly.

Ignite Your Future: 

At QAD, we are building intelligent, adaptive platforms that redefine manufacturing and supply chains. As Director of Engineering, you will lead a significant portion of the engineering organization responsible for QAD's Adaptive ERP. You will own multiple ERP platform and foundational capabilities while helping shape the continued evolution, modernization, quality, and operational readiness of a mature enterprise product used by manufacturers globally.

A major part of your mandate will also be accelerating the transition of existing customers to Adaptive. You will lead foundational ERP capabilities and AI-driven transformation tooling designed to analyze, simplify, and reduce the complexity of customer upgrades and modernization.

This role combines engineering leadership, technical depth, product thinking, and transformation. You will lead multiple teams and managers, work across internal and partner engineering organizations, and help define how AI can fundamentally change the way complex enterprise software is analyzed, modernized, and transformed.

The Mission: What You'll Be Building

Your organization sits at the intersection of QAD's existing ERP estate and its future. You will lead teams responsible for:

• ERP Engineering Leadership — Own and evolve a significant portion of QAD's ERP engineering portfolio, with accountability for product quality, architecture, delivery, modernization, and operational readiness.

• ERP Foundations & Extensibility — Own and evolve the foundational capabilities upon which ERP functional modules are built, ensuring a scalable foundation for the broader Adaptive Applications organization.

• AI-Driven Customer Transformation — Build intelligent tooling that analyzes and streamlines existing customer environments, reduces implementation and upgrade complexity, and accelerates transition to Adaptive.

• Customer Streamlining & Modernization — Partner across Engineering, Product, Services, and other QAD organizations to systematically reduce customer complexity while evolving a mature ERP estate toward a more standardized, scalable model.

You will translate strategy into execution, ensuring predictable delivery, strong architecture, and engineering excellence.

Your Impact/ What you will be doing: 

• Engineering Leadership & Delivery: Lead multiple engineering teams through Managers and Senior Managers, ensuring timely, high‑quality delivery of complex SaaS capabilities.

• AI-Driven Transformation: Lead the development and evolution of AI capabilities that automate and accelerate the analysis, streamlining, and transformation of existing ERP customer environments.

• Customer Transformation: Work across Engineering, Product, Services, and other stakeholders to understand the complexity of existing customer environments and turn those challenges into scalable product capabilities.

• People & Talent Development: Build, coach, and develop Engineering Managers and senior engineers; create strong succession and growth paths.

• Agile Execution: Drive Agile and product‑centric delivery models, balancing speed, quality, and sustainability.

• Cross‑Functional Partnership: Partner with Product, Architecture, Security, and DevOps to align roadmaps, priorities, and outcomes.

• Operational Ownership: Own product quality, release readiness, reliability, engineering health, and delivery outcomes across the ERP areas you lead, establishing clear measures and driving continuous improvement.

• Partner & Vendor Leadership: Lead effectively across a hybrid model of internal and partner engineering teams, establishing clear technical direction, accountability, ownership, and quality expectations

Required Skills & Qualifications

Experience & Leadership

• 10–12+ years of engineering leadership experience at an established ERP company (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Infor, Epicor, IFS, Microsoft Dynamics, or similar).

• Experience owning substantial parts of an ERP product or platform, not primarily implementing or integrating someone else's ERP.

• Director-level organizational scope: leading multiple teams and managers rather than functioning primarily as a hands-on architect or engineering manager.

• Experience working across Engineering, Product, Architecture, Services, and other stakeholders to translate complex customer or business problems into scalable software capabilities.

Core Technical Foundations & Team Delivery Model:

• ERP Product Engineering: Experience with mature enterprise products: large legacy codebases, long-lived customers, customization/extensions, upgrades, backward compatibility, and modernization. 

• AI & Software Engineering: Strong AI experience remains important. In particular, look for leaders who have applied AI to software development, modernization, or engineering transformation.

• Enterprise Software Architecture: Strong understanding of software architecture, system design, APIs, integrations, data, and distributed systems, with the ability to guide technical direction across a large and evolving enterprise product.

• Enterprise Product Evolution: Evidence of leading significant product or engineering transformation while continuing to serve an existing enterprise customer base.

• Cloud & Modern Engineering: Strong understanding of cloud architectures, preferably AWS, modern development practices, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, security, and modern SDLC practices.

• Technical Judgment: Ability to evaluate architectural alternatives and make pragmatic decisions that balance long-term technical direction with customer needs, delivery constraints, cost, risk, and business value.

• Partner Delivery Governance: Proven ability to establish technical direction, quality standards, engineering discipline, and accountability across blended internal and third-party engineering organizations.

The Mindset:

• Transformation-Oriented: Sees complexity as something to systematically eliminate rather than permanently accommodate.

• AI-Minded: Has a substantive point of view on how AI is changing software development and actively looks for opportunities to apply it to previously difficult problems.

• Customer-Focused: Understands that successful modernization must solve real customer problems, not simply produce cleaner technology.

• Pragmatic Decision-Maker: Balances future architecture and engineering ideals with the realities of mature enterprise software and existing customers.

• Coach & Multiplier: Develops managers and senior engineers and creates organizations capable of operating effectively without constant intervention.

• Ownership-Oriented: Takes accountability for outcomes, quality, reliability, and delivery.

• Continuous Improver: Consistently challenges existing systems and practices and looks for ways to make them simpler, more scalable, and more effective.

Why QAD?

You’ll be shaping the future of intelligent manufacturing platforms at global scale—working with ambitious leaders, modern cloud technologies, and AI‑driven innovation that delivers real‑world impact.

• Your health and well being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work-life balance.
• Opportunity to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
• Collaborative culture of smart and hard-working people who support one another to get the job done.
• An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea-sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
• Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set

About QAD:

QAD | Redzone is redefining manufacturing and supply chains through its intelligent, adaptive platform that connects people, processes, and data into a single System of Action. With three core pillars — Redzone (frontline empowerment), Adaptive Applications (the intelligent backbone), and Champion AI (Agentic AI for manufacturing) — QAD | Redzone helps manufacturers operate with Champion Pace, achieving measurable productivity, resilience, and growth in just 90 days.

QAD is committed to ensuring that every employee feels they work in an environment that values their contributions, respects their unique perspectives and provides opportunities for growth regardless of background. QAD’s DEI program is driving higher levels of diversity, equity and inclusion so that employees can bring their whole self to work.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.