Senior Vice President of Engineering

Next League is hiring a Senior Vice President of Engineering to lead our team through its next phase of growth. This is a high-impact,hands-on senior leadership role reporting to the Chief Digital Officer. We are looking for an empathetic leader who enjoys working alongside their teams to deliver world-class technology solutions for our clients.This role will continue the acceleration of our engineering modernization, scale our use of AI across client deliverables, and raise the technical bar across every engagement. Advance our AI-assisted engineering operating model and expand our generative and agentic AI capabilities, in collaboration with the broader Next League staff. Drive continued improvement in architecture and delivery quality across client engagements. Help shape where Next League invests in proprietary capability, where we lean on platform partners, and where we integrate best-of-breed third-party technologies. Define and champion an AI-grounded multi-year technology roadmap aligned with business growth and client needs across leagues, federations, teams, venues, and media organizations. Key Responsibilities Team Leadership & Operating Model Lead, mentor, and grow Next League’s engineering organization. Champion, pilot, and useAI-assisted development workflows and strong technical standards. Maintain and extend technical standards across Infrastructure as Code, source control discipline, CI/CD pipelines, microservices decomposition, security-by-design, and performance testing at scale. Ensure resilient and scalable delivery for live sporting events and other business-critical client environments by stepping in to pair-program architect, and debug alongside the team during critical delivery windows. AI, Data & Platform Innovation Guide the design and scaling of fan data and revenue platforms that deliver personalized, real-time experiences that drive revenue for our clients’ audiences, ensuring a deep understanding of the codebase to effectively align with developer challenges. Scale Next League’s production AI engineering practice across the Marketing Tech and Media Tech solutions we deliver for clients. Lead the design of observability and operations practices: component-level metrics, product-level evaluation, and integrated dashboards for live event monitoring. Client Partnership & Executive Engagement Collaborate with client technical leaders to define and build architecture, AI, and delivery solutions that drive outcomes aligned with their business objectives. Contribute technical depth and thought leadership to proposals, pitches, and discovery work, including co-authored content with cloud and platform partners. Represent Next League at industry conferences, partner events, and in published insights. Qualifications Experience designing and operating modern cloud-native platforms across distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architectures, observability, security, and infrastructure automation. The ideal candidate does not need hands-on depth in every framework or vendor on the market today, but should be comfortable evaluating architectures, guiding teams, and making sound technical tradeoffs across a fast-moving ecosystem. 10+ years of progressive technology leadership, with at least 5 years in a senior director or VP-level role managing and growing engineering teams. Proven track record architecting and delivering large-scale platforms for sports, media, entertainment organizations, or similar industry. Hands-on experience operationalizing AI (e.g., ML, generative, agentic) in production. Direct experience with AI-assisted coding tools, with the ability to guide teams on best practices for adopting and operating them. Experience designing and scaling real-time systems where latency and accuracy are mission-critical. Comfortable representing the firm with clients, partners, and at industry events. Experience working within or directly alongside professional sports organizations, tours, leagues, federatio…