AVP- Software Engineering, Digital Enablement

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The AVP, Software Engineering - Digital Enablement provides strategic and operational leadership for the Digital Enablement engineering portfolio, now including Enterprise Marketing capabilities. This leader is accountable for building and developing a high-performing engineering organization, translating business and technology strategy into executable roadmaps, and delivering secure, reliable, scalable digital capabilities that serve enterprise, customer, distribution, and marketing needs. The role leads approximately 50 FTE software engineering resources, including managers, directors, senior individual contributors, and engineering teams, and is accountable for talent, delivery, financial stewardship, technical quality, and operational performance across the portfolio.

This role will have a hybrid work arrangement (3 days a week in office) and can be located in Hartford, CT; Charlotte, NC or Columbus, OH. Must be eligible to work in the US without company sponsorship.

Key Responsibilities:

Engineering strategy and portfolio leadership: Set the engineering vision, strategy, multi-year roadmap, and operating plan for Digital Enablement, including Enterprise Marketing technology capabilities, aligning investments and priorities with enterprise architecture, product, business, marketing, security, data, and technology objectives.

Organization and people leadership: Lead an organization of approximately 50 FTE software engineering resources through multiple engineering leaders. Attract, develop, coach, and retain strong technical and leadership talent; build succession depth; and create an inclusive culture of accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.

Delivery and execution: Oversee multiple complex programs and product portfolios, establish clear outcomes and delivery governance, manage dependencies and risks, remove organizational barriers, and ensure predictable execution against commitments.

Digital platforms, marketing, and shared capabilities: Provide executive oversight for modern digital platforms, enterprise marketing capabilities, customer and prospect engagement solutions, enterprise integrations, APIs, user experiences, workflow solutions, mobile capabilities, content and document services, identity and access capabilities, and other shared application services within the Digital Enablement portfolio.

Engineering excellence: Set and reinforce engineering standards for architecture, clean and secure code, automated testing, documentation, observability, reliability, performance, resilience, and supportability.

Cloud, DevSecOps, and modernization: Advance cloud adoption, platform modernization, CI/CD, automation, and DevSecOps practices. Ensure solutions are production-ready, maintainable, scalable, and aligned with approved architectural patterns and technology standards.

AI-enabled engineering: Drive responsible adoption of AI-assisted development and agentic capabilities to improve engineering productivity, quality, testing effectiveness, documentation, and customer and employee experiences, while maintaining appropriate governance and controls.

Operational accountability: Own quality, reliability, service levels, vulnerability remediation, incident management, technical debt, application health, and continuous improvement across owned products and platforms.

Financial and workforce stewardship: Manage budget, capacity, workforce plans, vendor relationships, sourcing strategy, and resource allocation. Balance cost, speed, risk, resilience, and business value when making portfolio trade-offs.

Stakeholder influence: Advise senior executives and partner across Product, Architecture, Data, Security, Finance, Operations, Marketing, and business leadership. Translate complex technology topics into clear business value, risk, investment choices, and measurable outcomes.

Governance and risk: Ensure compliance with enterprise policies and standards for security, privacy, data governance, responsible AI, regulatory obligations, technology risk, and operational controls.

Leadership Outcomes

• Deliver a clear Digital Enablement strategy and roadmap, inclusive of Enterprise
• Marketing capabilities, with transparent priorities, investment choices, and measurable business outcomes.
• Build a resilient, engaged, and high-performing engineering organization with strong leadership depth and critical-skill coverage.
• Improve delivery flow, engineering productivity, quality, reliability, and speed to market through modern engineering practices and data-driven management.
• Strengthen platform reuse and shared-service adoption while simplifying the application landscape and managing technical debt.
• Maintain effective governance, operational discipline, financial accountability, and proactive risk management across the portfolio.

Qualifications

• 16+ years of applicable technology or software engineering experience, including 7+ years leading multiple teams, leaders, or a complex engineering portfolio.
• Demonstrated success leading a sizable software engineering organization, ideally 40+ FTE, through managers and senior technical leaders.
• Experience operating in a highly regulated industry such as insurance or financial services is a strong plus.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools, agentic AI concepts, and responsible AI practices in an enterprise environment is a strong plus.
• Deep understanding of modern software architecture, full-stack engineering, APIs and integration patterns, cloud platforms, containers, distributed systems, CI/CD, DevSecOps, and enterprise delivery models.
• Proven experience setting engineering strategy and translating it into roadmaps, operating plans, portfolio governance, and measurable execution outcomes.
• Experience leading modernization of complex enterprise applications, platforms, marketing technology capabilities, or shared digital capabilities while sustaining business-critical operations.
• Strong financial, workforce, vendor, capacity, and portfolio management experience, including making resource and investment trade-offs.
• Demonstrated ability to build leadership capability, coach managers and senior talent, manage performance, and strengthen succession pipelines.
• Executive-level communication and influence skills, with the ability to align diverse stakeholders and explain complex technical matters in business and risk terms.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Compensation

The listed annualized base pay range is primarily based on analysis of similar positions in the external market. Actual base pay could vary and may be above or below the listed range based on factors including but not limited to performance, proficiency and demonstration of competencies required for the role. The base pay is just one component of The Hartford’s total compensation package for employees. Other rewards may include short-term or annual bonuses, long-term incentives, and on-the-spot recognition. The annualized base pay range for this role is:

Equal Opportunity Employer/Sex/Race/Color/Veterans/Disability/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity or Expression/Religion/Age