Director, Product Engineering

At Zelis, we Get Stuff Done. So, let’s get to it! 

Position Overview

We are looking for a transformative engineering leader to drive the future of our Payments Technology solutions.  As the Director of Product Engineering for Payments Technology, you will unite product vision, technical excellence, and customer focus to deliver world-class solutions at scale.  You will collaborate with business partners and product leaders to align priorities and ensure timely, modern, and scalable delivery of enhancements across our application suite.  In this role, you will also work closely with Cloud and Application Architects as well as the Head of Platform Engineering to champion our technical modernization strategy – energizing your teams around this vision and ensuring strong alignment.

What You’ll Do

1. Roadmap Alignment & Delivery

• Partner closely with product and business teams to shape and prioritize a clear, customer-driven roadmap that also supports modernization of our technology stack.

• Establish domain-oriented teams with deep product, customer, and technical expertise who are highly skilled in building products that our customers love and work well for our business.

• Champion agile practices that convert strategic vision into high-quality and iterative deliverables.

• Proactively manage technical debt alongside feature delivery to ensure platform stability and scalability.

• Incorporate an iterative feedback loop by analyzing product performance and customer experience to continuously evolve the roadmap.

2. Technical Vision & Architecture Leadership

• Work side-by-side with architects and platform leaders to drive a forward-looking technical modernization agenda.

• Promote Platform-as-a-Service mindset among cross-functional engineering and IT leaders to drive velocity and efficiency in your teams.

• Inspire your teams to adopt scalable architectures, clean code practices, and a culture of continuous innovation.

• Collaborate with infrastructure, operations, and security teams to embed reliability, security, and scalability into product design.

3. Engineering Growth & Customer Obsession

• Build and mentor high-performing teams that prioritize customer impact and leverage modern technology to deliver it.

• Lead efforts to upskill engineers, infuse customer insights into development practices, and foster a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement.

• Drive agile maturity across engineering teams, enabling frequent releases, close team collaboration, and measurable outcomes.

• Cultivate a “Quality First” mindset and embed it into the development life cycle as well as automated DevOps workflows.

• Lead recruitment, training, and professional development initiatives to ensure the team is equipped with the skills needed to meet evolving business challenges.

4. Governance, Compliance, & Risk Management

• Collaborate with compliance, security, and IT risk teams to ensure that products meet regulatory requirements (such as PCI-DSS, SOC2, and other relevant standards).

• Implement technology governance best practices within the product engineering teams to ensure consistency in development processes, security, and code quality.

• Ensure that product releases comply with organizational risk management frameworks and are built with proactive measures for security and data protection.

What You’ll Bring to Zelis

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, ideally within payments or high-transaction environments.

• 3+ years in a Senior Manager or Director role.

• Experience leading globally distributed teams.

• Proven success in aligning senior business, product, and engineering leaders around clear priorities.

• Strong technical foundation in modern application development, architecture, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure.

• Demonstrated ability to translate business objectives into actionable engineering outcomes.

• Excellent communication, leadership, and decision-making skills, with the ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional teams.

Strongly Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading the development of internal CRMs, such as Salesforce.

• Experience leading an organizational structure that separates Platform Engineering modernization efforts from Product Engineering rapid application development.

• Familiarity with modern UI architecture (reusable web components, design systems) and backend integration patterns (GraphQL, BFF).