Director, Software Engineering: Retail Platform Delivery (ELERA)

About this role

<p><strong>Must be located near or within the area of Cincinnati, Ohio.&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions is seeking a Director, Software Engineering: Retail Platform Delivery (ELERA) to own end-to-end delivery of the ELERA retail platform across our strategic global retail partners, including Fortune 100 grocery, warehouse club, and general merchandise accounts.&nbsp;</p> <p>This role&nbsp;collapses&nbsp;Development, Test, and Professional Services Engineering into a single accountable function and&nbsp;operates&nbsp;as the customer-facing engineering authority for strategic programs. You own what ships, how it scales, how it recovers, and how quickly the team learns.&nbsp;</p> <p>This role runs on Toshiba’s agentic AI development ecosystem as the default way of working, not a side experiment. Agents&nbsp;participate&nbsp;in&nbsp;requirement&nbsp;decomposition, code generation, test authoring, PR review, defect triage, and release scoring. You are expected to measure and compound that leverage.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>What You Own&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Delivery velocity AND production reliability&nbsp;</strong>(DORA metrics with published targets)&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Unified engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;quality&nbsp;accountability&nbsp;</strong>in one org&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Customer-facing technical authority&nbsp;</strong>for strategic retail accounts&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>AI-native development workflows&nbsp;</strong>that compound team output quarter over quarter&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Production outcomes:&nbsp;</strong>what ships, how it performs, how it recovers, what it costs to run&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p>This is not an engineering-only or QA-only role. You own the outcome, the telemetry that proves it, and the workflows that compound it.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong><u>Key Responsibilities&nbsp;</u></strong></p> <p><strong>Customer-Facing Engineering Leadership&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li>Primary engineering authority for customer programs spanning POS, payments, loyalty, and store systems&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Partner with customer&nbsp;leaders&nbsp;to define success criteria, operational acceptance, rollout strategy, and risk posture&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Translate real-world retail workflows into architecture decisions, API contracts, and system behavior&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Maintain architecture decision records (ADRs) and a visible technical debt register tied to delivery plans&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>End-to-End Delivery Ownership (DORA-Native)&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Own the four DORA metrics as published, measurable targets:&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li><strong>Deployment Frequency:&nbsp;</strong>on-demand for services, scheduled-safe for store edge&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Lead Time for Changes:&nbsp;</strong>under 24 hours for services&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Change Failure Rate:&nbsp;</strong>under 10% trending down&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>MTTR:&nbsp;</strong>under 1 hour for customer-impacting incidents&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>AI-built feature branches with pre-merge release testing:</strong>&nbsp;agents build the full feature on an isolated branch; release-grade testing (functional, performance, security, integration) runs on that branch and must pass before&nbsp;merge. Main stays releasable&nbsp;at all times.&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Progressive delivery is mandatory: feature flags, canary, blue/green, shadow traffic.&nbsp;Decouple&nbsp;deploy from release.&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Zero scheduled-downtime windows for cloud services; store edge deploys are non-disruptive to live lanes&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>Unified Engineering + Quality Model&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Test-Driven Development is the baseline.&nbsp;</strong>Tests exist before code. No exceptions for new code paths.&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Quality gates block merges: coverage thresholds, mutation score, static analysis, SAST,&nbsp;dependency&nbsp;and license scanning, SBOM generation&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Contract testing (consumer-driven) between every service boundary;&nbsp;OpenAPI&nbsp;and&nbsp;AsyncAPI&nbsp;versioned and governed&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Chaos engineering in staging, quarterly game days, production-like load testing ahead of peak retail events&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li>Shift-right validation: synthetic monitoring, canary analysis, error budget enforcement&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Own metrics:&nbsp;</strong>defect leakage, change failure rate, cycle time, escape rate, production incident rate&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>AI-Native Development (Agentic Delivery)&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Leverage Toshiba’s agentic development ecosystem as the default delivery model:&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li><strong>AI-assisted engineering:&nbsp;</strong>requirement decomposition, design-to-code, test generation, refactoring at scale, PR review&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Agent-driven workflows:&nbsp;</strong>defect triage and clustering, root cause analysis from telemetry, release readiness scoring, customer-reported incident classification&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>MCP-integrated tooling:&nbsp;</strong>every engineer works with context-aware agents wired to source,&nbsp;tickets&nbsp;and&nbsp;telemetry&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Agents as team members:&nbsp;</strong>RaaS (RAG-as-a-Service), Sentinel AI for test authoring and execution, Agentic TPM for program management,&nbsp;CloudOps&nbsp;Sandbox for environment provisioning, ELERA Agent Registry for discovery&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Measured leverage:&nbsp;</strong>agent-authored code accepted, test cases generated, incidents auto-triaged, AI-equivalent headcount by role tracked quarterly&nbsp;</li> </ul> <ul> <li><strong>Feedback loops:&nbsp;</strong>production telemetry feeds AI-ranked backlog and refactor targets&nbsp;</li> </ul> <p><strong>Scalability, Performance, and Reliability (