Vice President, Production Engineering

Job description

At NiCE, we don’t limit our challenges. We challenge our limits. Always. We’re ambitious. We’re game changers. And we play to win. We set the highest standards and execute beyond them. And if you’re like us, we can offer you the ultimate career opportunity that will light a fire within you. **Role** Production Engineering applies software engineering principles to production systems, shifting operations from reactive, human-driven intervention to proactive, software-driven reliability and scale. The Vice President / Senior Vice President of Production Engineering is the senior executive accountable for the reliability, performance, scalability, and security of NICE’s global, AI-first platforms. The leader who fills this role is the owner of end-to-end production environments across NICE’s Cloud, Telecom, and Datacenter platforms, accountable for the operational outcomes of those platforms. The selected leader will drive the transformation of a diverse, operations-heavy organization into a modern, AI-first function. **Responsibilities** **Production Engineering Transformation** - Lead the evolution of an organization that includes software engineers, systems engineers, network engineers, telecom engineers, database administrators, application operations, DevOps, SRE, and NOC personnel into a cohesive Production Engineering function. - Shift the organization from ticket-driven, reactive operations toward software-first, automated systems that proactively ensure reliability and scale. - Define future-state roles, skill sets, and career paths aligned with Production Engineering and AI-first platform needs. - Drive up-skilling, re-skilling, and selective hiring to build modern production engineering capabilities. **Platform Operations** - Own the engineering and operation of global cloud infrastructure, telecom platforms, and datacenter environments. - Ensure production systems meet defined availability, performance, scalability, security, and cost targets. - Establish and enforce production readiness standards across all platform services. - Own operational governance for capacity planning, resilience, disaster recovery, and business continuity. **Production Engineering Discipline** - Establish Production Engineering as a core engineering discipline embedded with Product Engineering teams. - Drive adoption of software-first operational practices including automated recovery, infrastructure as code, synthetic testing, and observability. - Ensure reliability, scalability, performance, and security are treated as first-class design requirements, not post-release concerns. - Influence architecture and delivery decisions early to prevent systemic production risk. **Reliability, Observability & Incident Leadership** - Define and maintain service level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and reliability metrics across the platform. - Own observability strategy, including monitoring, alerting, logs, metrics, tracing, and capacity signals. - Lead global incident management, escalation, and executive-level response during major platform events. - Ensure incidents drive learning and systemic improvement rather than repeat failures or hero-driven response. **Automation, AI & Platform Enablement** - Drive the adoption of AI-assisted operations, automation, and agent-based workflows across production environments. - Leverage AI to improve detection, diagnosis, remediation, and capacity forecasting while maintaining appropriate human-in-the-loop controls. - Own CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure-as-code practices. - Reduce operational toil and manual intervention through automation and self-service platforms. **Cross-Functional Partnership** - Partner with Product Engineering to align platform capabilities with product delivery commitments. - Partner with Customer Support to strengthen feedback loops from customer experience into engineering action. - Partner with Security to ensure platforms are secure by design and compliant by default. - Act as a senior operational leader during customer-impacting events and executive escalations. **Organization & Talent Leadership** - Lead, scale, and grow global teams within Production Engineering. - Build strong leadership layers and develop senior technical leaders. - Foster a culture of ownership, bias for action, operational excellence, and continuous improvement. - Attract, retain, and develop world-class production engineers capable of operating AI-first platforms at scale. **Qualifications**