Senior Director, Principal Engineer - Customer and Commercial

The Principal Engineer is accountable for technical excellence, system integrity, and complex problem-solving across all Customer and Commercial product teams. This role operates as a force multiplier, tackling the hardest technical challenges, shaping architecture through influence, and ensuring engineering decisions support product outcomes at scale. 

The Principal Engineer partners closely with Engineering Leads, Product Managers, and Designers to turn product vision into robust, scalable solutions without owning formal people management. 

The Principal Engineer provides senior technical leadership on how products are built, shaping sustainable engineering practices that allow teams to move quickly while maintaining high standards for quality, security, reliability, and maintainability. This role leads architectural design and review for complex systems, evaluating upstream and downstream impacts of technical decisions and proactively mitigating cross-system risks inside. The Principal Engineer aligns product-level architecture to current global enterprise standards where appropriate and influences the evolution of enterprise architecture when product needs require deviation, supported by data, prototypes, and clear tradeoff analysis. The role also serves as a technical authority on security-by-design and regulatory compliance, partnering with Engineering Leads and security teams to ensure solutions meet cybersecurity expectations and applicable regulations, including SOX, without slowing product delivery. 

Core Responsibilities 

Technical Leadership & Architecture 

• Lead design and implementation of complex, high-impact systems and cross-cutting capabilities. 

• Shape architecture and technical direction through design reviews, prototypes, and reference implementations. 

• Identify and resolve systemic risks across performance, reliability, security, and scalability. 

• Align with team within and outside of the Product Operating model for full alignment across the enterprise 

Product-Centric Problem Solving 

• Translate product strategy and outcomes into durable technical solutions. 

• Participate in product discovery to validate feasibility, assess risk, and explore alternatives. 

• Challenge solution approaches using data, experimentation, and deep technical judgment. 

Engineering Excellence & Standards 

• Establish and evangelize engineering best practices and technical standards. 

• Raise the bar on code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness. 

• Drive reduction of critical technical debt that constrains product outcomes. 

Cross-Team Influence 

• Operate across team boundaries to resolve dependencies and technical misalignment. 

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through pairing, reviews, and technical coaching. 

• Act as a trusted advisor to Engineering Leads and Managers on technical tradeoffs. 

Delivery Enablement 

• Unblock teams by tackling the hardest problems or proving approaches quickly. 

• Improve system performance, cost efficiency, and operational stability. 

• Ensure solutions are maintainable and support continuous delivery. 

Decision Scope 

• Define technical design and implementation approaches for complex or cross-cutting initiatives. 

• Architectural recommendations and risk assessments. 

• Define technical standards and reference patterns. 

Success Measures 

• Delivery of high-impact technical solutions tied to product outcomes. 

• Improved system reliability, performance, and scalability. 

• Reduction in systemic technical debt and recurring incidents. 

• Increased technical capability of teams influenced. 

• Positive peer and leadership trust as a technical authority. 

Strategic Product & Commercial Enablement Capabilities 

• Demonstrated ability to create and execute innovative, technology-led strategies that enable Customer and Commercial functions within a Fast-Moving Consumer Packaged Goods (FMCG) environment, including sales, marketing, customer service, and route-to-market operations. 

• Deep, hands-on expertise in full-stack engineering and Salesforce platform development, including modern front-end frameworks, API-driven back ends, cloud infrastructure, and Salesforce ecosystems (Sales, Service, Experience, and custom platform extensions), with an emphasis on scalable, secure, and performant solutions. 

• Extensive experience leading technology experimentation from hypothesis and rapid prototyping through production deployment delivering deployable product outputs that validate customer value, operational impact, and technical feasibility. 

• Proven track record of defining measurable business outcomes (e.g., revenue growth, cost reduction, cycle-time improvement, customer satisfaction, adoption, and productivity gains) and being directly accountable for achieving those outcomes through technology and product delivery. 

Mindset & Behaviors 

• Outcome-driven, not technology-driven. 

• Thinks in systems and second-order effects. 

• Pragmatic, decisive, and grounded in data. 

• Invested in raising the engineering bar beyond personal output. 

• Interest and expert communication and presentation skills 

Required Experience & Skills 

• Bachelor’s degree preferably in computer science or related field or equivalent work experience in the Product Operating Model. 

• Prefer 4+ years experience leading a Product technology team 

• 10–15+ years of Enterprise software engineering experience. 

• Proven track record designing and delivering large-scale, distributed systems. 

• Expertise in modern cloud-native architectures and DevOps practices. 

• Strong communication skills to influence without authority. 

• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, high-stakes environments.