Senior Engineering Director (m/f/d)

What the job is about 

SOFICO is building a new product hub in Porto, growing from zero to around 60 people by mid-2028, and we are looking for a senior leader to build and lead it. 

As Director of Product Delivery, based in Porto and reporting to the Chief Product Officer (CPO), you will build cross-functional product domain teams of software engineers, business analysts, scrum masters, architects and testers for SOFICO’s Miles Enterprise product - mainly through new hires, complemented by a limited number of internal moves from across EMEA. As part of the product leadership team, you will keep your teams’ work tightly aligned with Product Management and the wider Product organization and its roadmap. 

The role combines people leadership with technical leadership: you will champion Domain-Driven Design (DDD), API products, and an AI-enabled product development lifecycle (PDLC). 

Your responsibilities will include: 

• Team leadership & growth: Build, organize, and mentor the Product Domain Team organization, hiring team leads, software engineers, and business analysts, and onboarding internal transfers from across EMEA. 

• People & personal development: Coach team leads and team members through regular feedback and development plans, building a strong leadership bench. 

• Business analysis: Hire, grow, and lead a strong business analysis capability that turns customer and domain needs into clear requirements. 

• Technical leadership & DDD: Set the technical direction for your domains with architects, applying strategic and tactical DDD to shape a modular platform and align teams with bounded contexts. 

• API products: Drive an API-first, API-as-a-product mindset, with clear contracts, versioning, and a strong developer experience. 

• AI-enabled PDLC: Embed AI across analysis, coding, testing, and documentation, with clear practices, guardrails, and metrics. 

• Delivery excellence: Own timely, high-quality delivery and bug SLAs, using strong agile practices and metrics such as lead time and forecasting accuracy to drive continuous improvement. 

• Strategic leadership: Contribute to product and engineering strategy, organizational design, and investment decisions as part of the product leadership team. 

• Collaboration: Partner with Product Management, architects, and fellow delivery leaders, and act as a senior escalation point on product issues. 

Your skills and interests 

You are a credible leader of both people and technology, equally comfortable coaching a team lead, facilitating an event storming session, or challenging an API contract. You communicate clearly with engineers and senior stakeholders alike, embrace AI in how software is built, and are energized by building an organization from the ground up. 

You care about: 

• High-performing, cross-functional teams and growing people into leaders. 

• Well-modeled domains and APIs designed as products. 

• Strong business analysis that bridges customers, domains, and engineering. 

• Using AI pragmatically to make teams faster and software better. 

• Reliable, high-quality software and continuous improvement. 

What You Bring: 

• 10+ years in software product development, including 5+ years leading cross-functional teams and managing team leads. 

• A track record of building teams from the ground up and scaling organizations to 50+ people. 

• Experience leading business analysts alongside software engineers. 

• Hands-on experience with Domain-Driven Design in complex enterprise domains. 

• Proven experience building API products (API-first design, REST and event-driven architectures, OpenAPI, versioning, governance). 

• Experience introducing AI-assisted tools and practices into the development lifecycle. 

• Solid grounding in agile delivery, enterprise and cloud-native architecture, and DevOps/CI/CD. 

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management at senior level, including with customers. 

• Based in Porto, with regular travel to our headquarters in Belgium.