Vice President of Engineering

Next League is hiring a Vice President of Engineering to lead our team through its next phase of growth. This is a hands-on senior leadership role reporting to the Chief Digital Officer, with ownership of our delivery practices and the technical platforms that underpin work for our clients. This role will continue the acceleration of our engineering modernization, scale our use of AI across client deliverables, and raise the technical bar across every engagement.

• Advance our AI-assisted engineering operating model and expand our generative and agentic AI capabilities, in collaboration with the broader Next League staff.
• Drive continued improvement in architecture and delivery quality across client engagements.
• Help shape where Next League invests in proprietary capability, where we lean on platform partners, and where we integrate best-of-breed third-party technologies.
• Define and champion an AI-grounded multi-year technology roadmap aligned with business growth and client needs across leagues, federations, teams, venues, and media organizations.

Team Leadership & Operating Model

• Lead, mentor, and grow Next League’s engineering organization.
• Evolve how the team builds: AI-assisted development workflows, strong technical standards, tight product/design/engineering collaboration, and fast prototyping-to-production paths.
• Maintain and extend technical standards across Infrastructure as Code, source control discipline, CI/CD pipelines, microservices decomposition, security-by-design, and performance testing at scale.
• Ensure resilient and scalable delivery for live sporting events and other business-critical client environments.

AI, Data & Platform Innovation

• Scale Next League’s production AI engineering practice across the Marketing Tech and Media Tech solutions we deliver for clients.
• Lead the design of observability and operations practices: component-level metrics, product-level evaluation, and integrated dashboards for live event monitoring.
• Guide the design and scaling of fan data and revenue platforms that deliver personalized, real-time experiences that drive revenue for our clients’ audiences.

Client Partnership & Executive Engagement

• Collaborate with client technical leaders to define and build architecture, AI, and delivery solutions that drive outcomes aligned with their business objectives.
• Contribute technical depth and thought leadership to proposals, pitches, and discovery work, including co-authored content with cloud and platform partners.
• Represent Next League at industry conferences, partner events, and in published insights.

Experience designing and operating modern cloud-native platforms across distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architectures, observability, security, and infrastructure automation. The ideal candidate does not need hands-on depth in every framework or vendor on the market today, but should be confident coding, evaluating architectures, guiding teams, and making sound technical tradeoffs across a fast-moving ecosystem.

• 10+ years of progressive technology leadership, with at least 5 years in a senior director or VP-level role managing and growing engineering teams.
• Proven track record architecting and delivering large-scale platforms for sports, media, entertainment organizations, or similar industry.
• Hands-on experience operationalizing AI (e.g., ML, generative, agentic) in production.
• Direct experience with AI-assisted coding tools, with the ability to guide teams on best practices for adopting and operating them.
• Experience designing and scaling real-time systems where latency and accuracy are mission-critical.
• Expert hands-on development experience in modern tech stack, preferably Node/Next/Typescript.
• Comfortable representing the firm with clients, partners, and at industry events.
• Professional services organization or similar team working environment experience is required
• Experience working within or directly alongside a professional supporting sports organizations, tours, leagues, federations, governing bodies, broadcasters, or media rights holders,  is strongly preferred.

Strong familiarity with several of the following:

• Cloud infrastructure and serverless platforms; Infrastructure as Code and environment automation.
• Real-time data pipelines, modern analytics stacks, and large-scale data warehousing.
• LLM-enabled application patterns, agentic workflows, prompt-as-code practices, and evaluation.
• Monitoring, observability, and production support.
• Personalization, decisioning, and intelligent automation in client marketing and media technology products.

We expect fluency with the kinds of ecosystems and tools used by modern AI-driven engineering teams, for example, cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure), Infrastructure as Code and orchestration (Terraform, Kubernetes), data and analytics platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, dbt), observability (Datadog), AI/ML frameworks (LangChain, vector databases, MLflow, Anthropic, OpenAI), and AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex). Equivalent experience with comparable technologies is welcome.

Leadership Attributes

• Strategic thinker with a bias for action who is energized by fast-moving, AI-driven environments.
• Collaborative, people-first leader who invests in the growth of individuals and teams through mentoring and coaching.
• Intellectually curious and externally visible; comfortable sharing technical thought leadership through writing, conference presentations, and partner co-authorship.
• Mission-aligned with Next League’s commitment to diversity, mentorship, and social impact.

This position is expected to travel to Next League office and client sites as needed; about 50% of travel required.  

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate. 

#LI-DNI