Senior Director, Engineering - AI, Photos and Personalization

Description

At Shutterfly, we make life’s experiences unforgettable. We believe there is extraordinary power in the self-expression. That’s why our family of brands helps customers create products and capture moments that reflect who they uniquely are.

At Shutterfly, we’re all about people — bringing them together, making them feel welcome, and connecting them to experiences. We make our customers’ memories last a lifetime by capturing, preserving, and sharing them through photography and personalized products. Through our family of brands, trend-setting products, cutting-edge technology, and best-in-class customer service, we help our customers, and each other, share life’s joy.

Shutterfly is looking for a Senior Director, Engineering to join their team! As a Senior Director of Engineering at Shutterfly, you will shape the future of AI-driven personalized commerce — leading the engineering strategy, execution, and culture that bring our customers’ memories to life through a secure, scalable, and intelligent next-generation platform. Specifically, you will be responsible for leading a portfolio of platform teams spanning Identity, Photos, AI, Personalization, and Marketing engineering — creating a unified intelligence layer that powers every customer interaction. You will harness billions of photos and petabytes of data to drive Personalization across various consumer touch points on the live website, mobile apps and offsite channels such as emails. You are a customer-centric, systems-thinking leader who thrives in complexity and is energized by building category-defining AI platforms that drive both customer delight and measurable business growth. You will extend photo-centric personalization to the entire consumer journey — from product discovery and automated product creation to cross-channel shopping experiences. This role will serve as the technical and organizational leader for AI-driven consumer experiences across Shutterfly engineering, elevating our platform maturity from AI-enabled to AI-native.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and evolve the long-term technical strategy and architectural roadmap for Shutterfly’s Photos Platform, AI, Personalization, Marketing engineering and Identity platforms ensuring security, scalability, and extensibility are built in by design.
• Develop a collaborative and inclusive high-performance team that fosters a culture of ownership, experimentation and innovation to prioritize the things that will have the biggest impact on both users and the businesses and deliver working solutions for our customers.
• Responsible for delivering on AI-driven business KPIs including personalization lift, conversion improvement, engagement growth, automated product creation adoption, and marketing performance optimization.
• Define and execute the AI platform strategy including model lifecycle management, experimentation frameworks, model observability, and responsible AI practices.
• Lead development of scalable AI systems for photos, generative content creation, and real-time personalization across web, mobile, and marketing channels.
• Establish rigorous experimentation and evaluation frameworks to validate AI-driven customer experiences and optimize for measurable business impact.
• Build reusable AI and data platform capabilities including feature stores, training pipelines, and model monitoring systems to support multiple consumer-facing applications.
• Drive adoption of AI-enabled development practices and automation to increase engineering productivity and accelerate innovation.
• Own end-to-end engineering delivery of platform capabilities by partnering with product, UX, and business leaders. Represent the technology function in C-suite discussions to align priorities and outcomes.
• Provide architectural leadership and technical oversight across platform teams to ensure scalable, resilient, and high-performance systems and drive execution from product vision through delivery.
• Measure success through customer experience improvements, platform reliability (SLOs), delivery velocity, cost efficiency, and AI-enabled productivity gains.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years in engineering leadership with a track record of building and leading high-performing global engineering organizations.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams that build and operate AI/ML systems in production, including experience with model training, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring at scale.
• Experience building personalization, recommendation, ranking, or generative AI systems in consumer-facing applications.
• Proven experience architecting and delivering highly available, scalable, and low-latency systems for high-traffic applications.
• Demonstrated success leading end-to-end engineering delivery of large-scale systems across distributed teams.
• Strong technical expertise across architecture, system design, cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), and modern development practices.
• Familiarity with modern MLOps practices, experimentation platforms, and large-scale data processing systems.
• Experience defining and implementing AI and automation strategies that drive measurable business and productivity outcomes.
• Deep understanding of secure software development lifecycle (SDL), Shift-Left principles, and vulnerability management.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence at all levels — from engineers to executives.
• Strong business and product orientation, with the ability to balance innovation, execution, and operational rigor.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; advanced technical degree preferred.

Supporting a diverse and inclusive workforce is important to Shutterfly not only because it directly reflects our value of Embracing our Differences, but also because it’s the right thing to do for our business and for our people. We welcome all applicants and evaluate them based on their qualifications. Learn more about our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on our Career Site.

The compensation package for this role is based on multiple factors, such as job level, responsibilities, location, and candidate experience. The base pay ranges included below are specific to the locations listed, and may not be applicable to other locations.

California : [$191,250-270,500]

Connecticut and New York: [$191,250-247,500]

Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and Washington: [$191,250-229,250]

Nevada: [$179,750-247,500]

Maryland and New Jersey: [$206,250-247,500]

Hawaii : [$179,750-215,500]

This position may be eligible for a bonus incentive, health benefits, a 401K program, and other employee perks. More details about our company benefits can be found at https://shutterflyinc.com/benefits/.

This opportunity can be remote, but candidates must reside in a state in which Shutterfly is registered to do business. This includes all US states except District of Columbia, North Dakota, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming.

This position will accept applications on an ongoing basis until filled.

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