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Ashley Furniture Industries is the world's largest furniture manufacturer and a leader in furniture manufacturing., extensive global distribution, transportation, and multi-channel retail. Our core values combined with our growth values of a Culture of Leadership, Customer Centricity, and Boundaryless collaboration, drive our relentless pursuit of innovation and operational excellence.

Position Summary:

Reporting to the CIO, the SVP of Engineering leads strategic direction and execution across all IT engineering disciplines. This role oversees software, infrastructure, data, and security engineering, ensuring excellence in quality, scalability, and performance across our enterprise.

Key Responsibilities:

Engineering Strategy & Vision:

• Develop and articulate a comprehensive enterprise-wide engineering strategy and roadmap that aligns with Ashley Furniture's overall business objectives, digital transformation goals, and IT vision.
• Define the technical direction, architectural principles, and engineering standards for all technology solutions, ensuring robustness, scalability, resilience, security, and maintainability across the entire technology landscape.
• Identify and evaluate emerging technologies, engineering trends (e.g., AI/ML in development, generative AI for code, advanced cloud-native architectures, Site Reliability Engineering), and best practices to drive innovation and efficiency.

Engineering Excellence & Delivery:

• Oversee the entire engineering lifecycle, from conceptualization and design to development, testing, deployment, and operational support across all engineering domains (Software, Infrastructure, Data, Security).
• Drive the adoption and continuous improvement of modern engineering methodologies (e.g., Agile, DevOps, Scrum, SAFe), CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and MLOps practices where applicable.
• Establish and enforce rigorous engineering standards, code quality, design patterns, and quality gates to ensure the delivery of high-quality, defect-free solutions that adhere to Ashley's "Dirty Fingernail" value of meticulous detail.
• Implement robust monitoring, observability, and alerting strategies to ensure system stability and performance in production environments.

Technical Leadership & Architectural Governance:

• Provide expert technical leadership and guidance to all engineering teams, fostering an environment of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous learning.
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture to define and evolve architectural standards, patterns, and principles that guide system design and integration.
• Oversee critical technical decisions, ensuring alignment with long-term strategic goals and current industry best practices.

Organizational Design & Talent Development:

• Design and optimize the organizational structure of the engineering function to maximize efficiency, collaboration, and talent utilization across various domains and business-aligned teams.
• Attract, hire, mentor, and retain world-class engineering talent at all levels, from individual contributors to senior managers, embodying Ashley's Culture of Leadership.
• Implement comprehensive professional development programs, technical training initiatives, and career pathing to foster continuous growth and maintain technical currency within the engineering organization.
• Foster a high-performance culture that values collaboration, innovation, accountability, and psychological safety, driven by passion, discipline, and a boundaryless mindset.

Stakeholder Collaboration & Business Alignment:

• Partner extensively with Product Management, business leaders (Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Retail, Sales, Finance, HR, Customer Success), and other IT functions (Infrastructure & Operations, Data & Analytics) to deeply understand business needs, define requirements, and deliver engineering solutions that directly drive business value.
• Communicate complex technical strategies, project statuses, risks, and performance metrics clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executive leadership and the Board.
• Ensure engineering efforts are tightly aligned with business priorities, strategic initiatives, and investment priorities.

Governance, Security & Compliance:

• Establish and enforce robust engineering governance policies, coding standards, design review processes, and release management frameworks.
• Ensure all developed and managed systems comply with internal security policies, industry best practices, and external regulatory requirements (e.g., data privacy, PCI DSS, SOX relevant controls).
• Oversee system security reviews, vulnerability management, and timely patching and remediation efforts.

Core Competencies:

• Strategic Engineering Leadership: Ability to define and execute a compelling engineering vision and strategy that drives business outcomes, innovation, and competitive advantage for a complex, integrated enterprise.
• Deep Technical Mastery: Profound hands-on and leadership knowledge across multiple engineering domains: software architecture, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), network design, data engineering, cybersecurity fundamentals, and modern programming paradigms.
• Agile & DevOps Transformation: Proven leadership in implementing, scaling, and maturing Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, and SRE practices across a large engineering organization.
• Scalability, Performance & Reliability: Demonstrated success in designing, building, and operating highly scalable, performant, resilient, and secure enterprise-grade systems for mission-critical operations.
• Global Team Building & Talent Development: Exceptional ability to attract, hire, mentor, coach, and grow diverse, world-class engineering talent at scale across global locations.
• Business Acumen: Understanding of furniture manufacturing processes, global supply chain, distribution logistics, transportation complexities, multi-channel retail operations, and corporate functions; able to effectively translate business needs into technical solutions.
• Vendor & Partnership Management: Experience in evaluating, selecting, negotiating with, and managing technology vendors, system integrators, and strategic consulting engagements.
• Security-First Mindset: Strong understanding of secure-by-design principles, application security vulnerabilities, infrastructure security, and data protection.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field. Master's degree or Ph.D. in a relevant engineering discipline preferred.
• Minimum of 18 years of progressive experience in IT, or IT leadership roles, with at least 10 years in a senior executive leadership position overseeing large, multi-functional engineering organizations (e.g., managing teams of 200+ engineers across various domains).
• Proven track record of successfully leading the development, deployment, and operation of complex enterprise-wide technical solutions that delivered significant business value across diverse domains (e.g., ERP, CRM, Supply Chain Management, E-commerce, Manufacturing Execution Systems, Point of Sale, Data Platforms).
• Extensive experience with leading cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and driving cloud-native development and infrastructure strategies.
• Deep practical experience in implementing and maturing Agile and DevOps practices in a large enterprise.
• Experience managing large technology budgets (multi-million dollars) and complex vendor relationships.
• Strong understanding of cybersecurity principles, data governance, and regulatory compliance.
• Experience in a large, privately held company with integrated furniture manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and retail operations is highly desirable.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

• System Reliability & Performance (SLAs): Consistent achievement of high availability (e.g., 99.99%) and performance targets for critical business systems and infrastructure.
• Engineering Delivery Velocity: Reduction in the average cycle time from idea/requirement to production deployment for new features, applications, and infrastructure capabilities.
• Quality & Stability (Production Defects): Reduction in the number of critical and high-severity defects identified in production environments, and improvements in Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR).
• Business Value Realization: Quantifiable business outcomes delivered by engineering solutions (e.g., cost savings from automation, revenue uplift from e-commerce features, efficiency gains in manufacturing).
• Technical Debt Management: Measurable progress in reducing accumulated technical debt and improving the long-term maintainability and upgradeability of the technology portfolio.
• Cost Efficiency of Engineering: Optimization of engineering spend (e.g., cost per feature, cloud cost optimization, budget adherence).
• Security Posture & Compliance: Improvement in the security posture of engineered systems as measured by audits, vulnerability scans, and successful compliance with regulations (e.g., PCI DSS).
• Talent Retention & Engagement: High retention rates and satisfaction scores within the engineering organization, indicating a positive and challenging work environment.
• Innovation Diffusion: Adoption rate of new technologies, frameworks, and architectural patterns across the engineering landscape.
• Project Delivery Success Rate: Percentage of significant engineering projects delivered on time, within budget, and meeting or exceeding business requirements.

Ashley Furniture Industries is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.