DIRECTOR - TECHNOLOGY SDLC & Digital Engineering Transformation

AT&T is seeking a Director - Technology to lead, scale, and transform the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and release engineering functions across our enterprise digital platforms. This leader will drive a massive cultural and technical shift, establishing AI-accelerated software engineering as the cornerstone of our developer experience (DevEx) and delivery governance. You will directly manage cross-functional engineering teams spanning DevOps/SRE, Developer Tooling, and Core Automation, while serving as the primary champion for modernizing how our entire organization builds software., Engineering Transformation & AI Acceleration

• Pioneer the AI-accelerated SDLC blueprint, establishing the governance, safety protocols, and deployment strategies for AI coding assistants and autonomous engineering agents across all developer squads.
• Drive engineering culture modernization, transforming the organization from traditional, manual delivery paradigms to high-velocity, AI-augmented engineering practices.
• Formulate and track innovative DevEx metrics (e.g., DORA, developer sentiment, cognitive load reduction, and AI-tooling adoption/ROI) to prove and optimize velocity improvements.
• Upskill and build durable, in-house teams, systematically leverage AI accelerators to maximize individual and squad engineering output.

Executive Communication & Presentation

• Evangelize the engineering transformation roadmap through highly polished, compelling presentations, technical demonstrations, and business-value pitches to executive stakeholders.
• Translate complex platform architectures and DevSecOps technical debt into simple, high-impact business narratives that align with strategic enterprise priorities and secure funding.
• Facilitate cross-functional alignment by leading steering committees, technology workshops, and town halls to drive adoption and generate excitement around modern digital engineering initiatives.

Delivery Leadership & Toolchain Ownership

• Own end-to-end delivery execution for core platform tooling, automation frameworks, and cloud-native release infrastructure.
• Establish the digital developer platform, managing the engineering toolchain (e.g., Jira, GitHub, SonarQube, Artifactory) to minimize friction and automate quality/security gates (SAST/DAST).
• Set the standards for progressive delivery patterns (canary, blue-green, feature flagging) and modern automated testing (contract, performance, E2E) within an AI-assisted ecosystem.

Platform Accountability & Operations

• Drive DevOps strategy, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) governance, and environment management across development, staging, and production zones.
• Establish platform security hardening, access control (RBAC), and regulatory compliance structures across digital service environments.
• Own incident response, Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and continuous improvements for platform reliability.

The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on technical roots in cloud-native architectures with proven experience driving organizational change, adopting AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, agentic workflows), and possessing exceptional presentation and storytelling skills to articulate the business value of engineering modernization to executive leadership., Leadership & Transformation Experience

• 12+ years of progressive technology leadership, with 3+ years directly managing engineering teams focused on SDLC automation, platform engineering, or digital application development.
• Proven track record of leading large-scale cultural and technical transformations (e.g., migrating from legacy architectures, agile transformations, or executing company-wide AI developer tool adoptions).
• Superb presentation, storytelling, and communication skills with a demonstrated ability to present to senior executives and diverse stakeholder groups.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, develop, and retain top-tier platform and software engineering talent.

Technical Depth & AI Tooling (Hands-On Experience Required)

• Deep experience with modern digital stacks using technologies like Java (Spring Boot), Node.js, Python, or Go, and cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Hands-on experience implementing and driving the adoption of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, LLM-based refactoring utilities, prompt registries) across software development workflows.
• Demonstrated expertise in CI/CD pipeline automation (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Strong understanding of modern test automation frameworks and code quality/static analysis tools (SonarQube).

Delivery & Operational Excellence

• Track record of improving release predictability, reducing cycle times, and decreasing production change-failure rates using DORA-based metrics.
• Experience with observability and APM suites (Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace) to monitor pipeline health and runtime infrastructure.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in platform engineering, internal developer portals (e.g., Backstage), or developer tooling orchestration.
• Experience with advanced software delivery patterns, including feature-flag-driven releases (LaunchDarkly), micro-frontends, and service-virtualization.

Contributions to open-source developer tooling, CI/CD plugins, or AI-assisted coding extensions