Vice President, Production Engineering

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 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field  

• 15+ years of engineering leadership experience operating large-scale, distributed platforms. 

• 8+ years leading senior engineering or operations organizations spanning infrastructure, platform, or production environments. 

• Proven experience leading organizational and skill transformation within engineering or operations teams. 

• Strong background in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, and runtime platforms. 

• Demonstrated ability to establish engineering standards and influence architecture across organizations. 

• Experience partnering with Product, Security, and Support leaders in complex environments. 

Preferred 

• Experience operating AI-enabled or data-intensive platforms in production. 

• Experience modernizing legacy operations or NOC-based organizations. 

• Background in Production Engineering or SRE organizations at scale. 

• Experience operating in regulated, sovereign, or enterprise customer environments.