Director of Engineering: Nielsen Mobile

Category: Job Postings

Nielsen Mobile is the premier provider of market research and business intelligence to the wireless communications and media industries.

Reporting to Nielsen Mobile’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, direct a team of very senior technical leads, each of whom is responsible for one or more of our information products (Product Technical Leads - PTLs). Improve and define architecture, toolset, and best practices. Remove roadblocks to productivity. By hands-on work with PTLs, learn all technical aspects of product delivery, and be prepared to cover any interruptions in staffing. Manage the software development function, including having a significant role in budgeting, staffing, and escalations of problem management.

Responsibilities:

Understand existing software development techniques, tools, and processes used in delivery of Nielsen Mobile’s information products. Determine, build consensus for, and implement adoption of new technology to further improve Nielsen products, meeting functional requirements while also satisfying company expectations for usability, manageability, maintainability and cost. Manage relationships with tools vendors;
Take overall responsibility for velocity and predictability of delivery of new initiatives across products, appropriate to Nielsen Mobile’s business and customer requirements. Continually encourage technical leads to build successful business processes, not just software systems. Ensure all improvements are reflected in Nielsen Mobile’s documented development process;
Manage the Product Technical Lead staff. Take overall responsibility for onshore and offshore software engineering staff, totaling more than 40 individuals;
Work within the Nielsen Mobile organization to define and strengthen interface points with other groups, including Program Management, Quality Assurance, IT-Operations, Production, Measurement Science, and Client Services. Serve as liaison to the Nielsen Company’s Global Business Services, to make sure Nielsen Mobile techniques are appropriately aligned with the entire company;
Understand each product and product team in detail. Be able to do hands-on work whenever necessary/appropriate, especially as needed to back-fill for PTL staff during absences. This includes managing engineering teams by defining and supervising assignments in detail (code review). It may also include hands-on engineering as designer/coder.
Understand and where necessary define administrative processes essential to the engineering organization, including budgeting and procurement.

Requirements:

BS/MS in Computer Sciences or equivalent
At least 10 years hands-on software development, including at least 5 years as a software engineer. Experience in a data-centric environment very helpful;
At least 5 years at senior architect level. In-depth working knowledge of software architectures and IT deployment architectures, including diagramming tools/techniques;
At least 5 years as a software development manager with administrative responsibility for teams and technical responsibility for products;
Strong knowledge of database technology and relational database design, especially Data Warehousing and ETL. Hands-on experience with MS SQL Server 2005 a strong plus.

Experience with enterprise reporting, and tools ranging from Microsoft Excel to high-end BI tools. Specifically, experience with MicroStrategy a strong plus;
Experience providing data models to J2EE applications very desirable;
Solid knowledge of J2EE and other web technologies. Hands-on experience and proven results with Java.
Knowledge of other OO languages very useful, especially C++.
Working knowledge of scripting languages, especially Perl.
Familiarity and direct experience with distributed staffing models, including offshore engineering.
Strong interpersonal and client facing skills

Domain experience with wireless communications a strong plus, especially:
- Knowledge of SS7 telecommunications protocols;
- Knowledge of wireless protocols such as GSM, TDMA, CDMA, UMTS, EV-DO, HSDPA;
- Geographic Information Systems and related tools, such as MapInfo

MMA Global :: Article

Director of Engineering: Nielsen Mobile