Senior Director, Engineering - Corporates, Financial Institutions & Sovereigns

Fitch Ratings is looking for a builder, a challenger, and a boundary-pusher to lead the engineering organization responsible for all applications and services powering our Corporates, Financial Institutions, and Sovereigns lines of business. This is not a role for someone who optimizes within the status quo - it's a role for someone who questions it, reimagines it, and has the courage and capability to do something about it.

As Senior Director, you will have executive ownership of four engineering teams comprising a couple of dozen engineers. You'll lead a talented, multidisciplinary group tackling some of the most consequential technology challenges in global financial intelligence - maintaining and evolving the systems that analysts and clients depend on today, while simultaneously building the next generation of platforms from a position of real creative freedom and organizational backing.

This is a role for someone who moves fast, experiments boldly, and doesn't wait for permission to try something new. Someone who has broken things in the pursuit of building something better, who sees constraints as invitations to be clever, and who brings an infectious sense of possibility that raises the ambition of everyone around them.

We'll Count on You To:

• Challenge the conventional and set a bolder technical vision.
• Own the strategic direction, execution, and engineering culture of four high-performing full-stack engineering teams.
• Interrogate existing systems and lead your teams toward smarter, faster, and more powerful answers.
• Set a technical vision that genuinely reimagines what's possible for the platforms powering Fitch's most critical analytical work.
• Build, develop, and inspire exceptional people.
• Lead, mentor, and empower a team of team leads and engineers across a range of technical backgrounds and experience levels.
• Foster a culture where intellectual curiosity is celebrated, experimentation is encouraged, and where people feel safe enough to take risks and learn from what doesn't work.
• Attract and retain engineers who are hungry, inventive, and proud of both the quality of what they ship today and the audacity of what they're building toward.
• Oversee the full lifecycle of the applications and services central to Fitch's Corporates, Financial Institutions, and Sovereigns analytical workflows.
• Balance the discipline of maintaining production-grade systems with the creative ambition to tear down and rebuild what no longer serves the business well.
• Identify and actively pursue opportunities to design and build net-new applications and platforms that replace or leapfrog legacy approaches.
• Define how intelligent systems become structural, load-bearing parts of the platforms your teams own.
• Act as a strategic partner to a broad and diverse set of stakeholders whose workflows and outcomes depend directly on the platforms your teams own.
• Build organizational credibility through consistent delivery, clear technical vision, and the ability to bring bold ideas to life.

What You Need To Have:

• 18+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with substantial time in senior technical leadership roles overseeing multiple teams and disciplines.
• Proven multi-team leadership with a track record of building high-performing, inventive engineering cultures at meaningful scale.
• Deep technical credibility and hands-on instinct with strong command of modern software architecture, cloud-native platforms, and production-grade application delivery.
• Full-stack engineering expertise with proven background in modern enterprise technology stacks, including React, Java, and/or Python in production environments.
• A bias for experimentation and innovation with a demonstrable history of pushing technical boundaries.
• Modernization and greenfield experience with proven ability to evolve existing platforms while simultaneously designing and delivering new systems.
• People leadership and talent development with demonstrated ability to attract, grow, and retain exceptional engineers and engineering leaders.
• Cross-functional stakeholder management with proven ability to partner effectively across analytical, operational, and business-facing teams.
• Executive communication skills to translate bold technical vision for non-technical audiences.

Education: Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related technical field - or equivalent expertise demonstrated through impact.

What Would Make You Stand Out:

• An ML or AI engineering background with meaningful experience building machine learning systems.
• Deep cloud-native expertise with hands-on mastery of AWS and/or Azure, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS, microservices architecture, and sophisticated CI/CD pipelines.
• Generative AI and intelligent systems experience with hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG architectures, or production ML systems.
• AI-native delivery leadership with direct experience implementing AI-augmented development lifecycles.
• Transformation and platform modernization leadership with a history of successfully reimagining complex, production-critical platforms.
• A maverick streak with enterprise judgment, knowing how to challenge conventions within a complex organization.
• Financial services domain knowledge with familiarity with analytical workflows and credit ratings processes.
• Technical thought leadership through contributions to open source, speaking at industry events, or publishing engineering content.

What We Offer:

• A genuine mandate to innovate with real organizational backing.
• Executive visibility and strategic influence with direct access to senior leadership.