Senior Director of Engineering

The organisation

Our customer Materialise is a dynamic Belgian high-tech worldwide company, founded in 1990, with over 1,800 employees worldwide. Materialise’s mission is to innovate for a better and healthier world through its software and hardware infrastructure and in-depth knowledge of additive manufacturing (also known as 3D Printing). Their customers are in diverse industries, such as automotive, aerospace, medical, research and academia.

Materialise Software is one of the three business divisions of Materialise, and is the world leader with regard to 3D printing software. Their software powers 3D Printing factories around the world, with more than 75% of all Fortune 500 companies in aerospace and automotive using their software. They are a fast growing business, in a fast growing industry

The engineering department within the Software business unit needs to be the state of the art software factory, capable of delivering the technically superior solution offering, based on the needs and strategy defined by- and in collaboration with market management.. It also needs to drive Technological Innovation to maintain technical and thought superiority.

Engineering consists of a large multidisciplinary team of close to 165 FTE spread out over 5 offices (Leuven, Kiev, Bremen, Ghent and Kuala Lumpur).

The position

The Sr Director of Engineering will lead this entire organization and ensure that the engineering organization is a world-class software factory capable of maintaining our best-in-class status in products and innovation.

In the current structure, the Sr Director of Engineering has 9 direct reports in Belgium, and 4 functional reports abroad.

The Sr Director of Engineering will report to the Vice President & General Manager of the Software Business unit, and will be part of the Management team of the Software Business Unit.

Responsibilities within Engineering include:

• Technical product management, translating customer and business needs coming from the Market Management organization into functional requirements and a product development and release plan (20 FTE)
• Portfolio and Product architecture (10 FTE): Ownership of the high level technical design of our portfolio and the different product (platforms) populating it. Ensure appropriate compatibility and seamless workflows across applications
• Development and Testing (110 FTE): Development of our best in class software solutions. See our website for an overview of the products. Technologies used are mainly C, C++ and C#
• Technical innovation (20 FTE): Driving the overall technology innovation roadmap, consisting of research and concept development projects, IP generation, technology consulting towards the market and other engineering groups and a clear technology transfer plan into our market offering.

Tasks & responsibilities

• Demonstrate very strong technical leadership and people management skills including solid communication and analytical skills with thorough understanding of product development and successful problem definition, decomposition, estimation and resolution
• Provide technology leadership, inspire your team and proactively bring new ideas, technologies, and methodologies to the table.
• Partner with Commercial Product Management in the market management organization to internalize business needs and drive priorities.
• Leadership experience – you have built and managed large and international teams of engineers and love developing and growing people, helping them achieve their full potential
• Change Management: Make the new organization and workflows as successful as possible
• Responsible for building a world class software development teams using current-day-and-age methodologies and frameworks
• Alignment with cross-functional service team owners to understand initiatives and implementations
• Deliver application and services to validate and ensure the portfolio meets all operational standards. Our software is used in production environments, so must be rock-solid
• Work with product owners and architects to develop multi-generation software technology plans
• Work directly with customers to understand business and technical needs
• Drive increased efficiency across the teams, eliminating duplication, leveraging product and technology reuse
• Support process improvements which guide the development, sustaining & support activities
• Be proficient at doing deep-dives into problem-solving with your teams and able to leverage past technical expertise in Requirements Definition, Architecture, Software Development and Quality Assurance
• Define a roadmap with regard to transition from desktop based applications towards the cloud

Candidate profile:

• 7-10 years of experience in a similar role, in a high tech fast evolving context
• 15+ years of experience in the software industry, preferably including software development experience
• Expertise with building and deploying both user-facing and ops-supporting products & tools.
• Master or PhD in Science or Engineering with a specialization in Computer Science (during studies or by demonstrable equivalent experience)
• Structure approach, capabilities to design and implement appropriate working model and corresponding structure/process in a large multinational organization
• Agility in thought, and ability to work in fast changing context. Drive the appropriate change management projects to adapt the organization to the growing and changing industry we operate in, while ensuring the appropriate stability to your teams to ensure reliable product releases

The offer

• An attractive salary with an extensive package extra-legal advantages.
• A result-oriented culture, attention for well-being, fit with the job and comprehensive grow and learning opportunities.
• The possibilty to contribute to a sustainable technological development.

Interested?

You can apply to this position by using the form below.

Do you feel attracted by this function? Please do contact us quickly! We take the time to go through your CV and motivation letter. In case you pass this screening, we take the time to talk to you and to bring you in contact with this fantastic company.

Your data is being handled with the utmost discretion.

For more information please contact Patrick Van Lijsebetten, +32 3 443 04 81.