Senior Director, MTS

Gracenote, the content data division of Nielsen, powers innovative entertainment experiences for leading media companies worldwide. We are seeking a visionary and results-driven Director of Engineering to lead our high-impact engineering organization at Gracenote. In this role, you will be responsible for defining technical strategy, building scalable architectures, driving platform modernization, and leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams (including Engineering Managers and technical leads). You will lead the evolution of next-generation metadata processing pipelines, integrating modern data platforms, automated web crawling, content curation, real-time metadata serving, and AI/Machine Learning solutions. You will collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Global Business leadership.

Responsibilities

Drive long-term technical vision and architectural direction for Gracenote's core metadata, ingestion, and serving platforms; Lead initiatives to platformize metadata processing pipelines, transitioning legacy flows into modern, intelligent, high-performance distributed architectures; Partner with Data Science and AI teams to integrate machine learning, NLP, computer vision, and GenAI capabilities into core operational processes, content ingestion, and data enrichment pipelines; Lead, mentor, and build an engineering organization of Engineering Managers, Architects, and Software Engineers; Foster an inclusive culture based on Nielsen values, promoting innovation, continuous learning, technical rigor, and high associate retention; Oversee succession planning, performance management, career growth frameworks, and talent pipelines (including university relations and new joiner programs); Partner directly with Product Management, Data Science, and cross-functional executives to align engineering deliverables with key business metrics and strategic revenue drivers; Coordinate across local and global stakeholders to ensure seamless integration, high productivity, and successful delivery of high-visibility projects; Ensure overall system health by defining Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), focusing on high availability, fault tolerance, low latency, recoverability, and scalability across global delivery APIs; Drive agile methodologies and apply an automation-first mindset to software delivery, CI/CD, testing automation, and operational monitoring; Establish robust quality assurance standards, operational cadences, and continuous process optimization across the Product Development Lifecycle

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field; 13+ years of total software development and engineering experience, with a proven track record of designing scalable, high-performance systems; 5+ years of direct management experience, including managing managers, technical leads, and multi-disciplinary global engineering teams; Deep expertise in object-oriented and functional programming languages (e.g., Golang, Java, Python, Scala); Proven experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems and microservices; Hands-on experience with modern data architectures: real-time streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka), batch data processing (e.g., Spark, Flink), and RESTful/GraphQL API serving; Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), NoSQL platforms (MongoDB, Cassandra), caching layers (Redis, Memcached), and search engines (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch); Solid expertise in cloud-native deployment environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and cloud ecosystems