Vice President, Engineering Productivity and Quality

C3 AI is seeking a Vice President of Engineering Productivity and Quality to lead the strategic vision and technical execution of our developer experience. This executive will own the platforms, processes, and tools that empower C3 AI's world-class engineering teams to build, deploy, and operate complex enterprise AI applications with velocity, resilience, and uncompromising quality. This individual will be a critical force multiplier, responsible for architecting systems that measure and improve the performance, efficiency, and operational excellence of the entire engineering organization.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute a multi-year technical strategy and roadmap for Engineering Productivity and Quality, aligning with C3 AI's product vision and long-term company goals.
• Champion and cultivate a durable culture of engineering excellence, continuous improvement, and "built-in quality" across the entire engineering organization.
• Establish and govern engineering-wide standards and best practices for release readiness, production health, operational resilience, and incident management.
• Act as the executive thought leader on engineering performance and developer experience, partnering with other engineering VPs to drive strategic, cross-functional initiatives.
• Drive the strategic vision for the C3 AI Developer Experience, systematically identifying and eliminating friction to optimize developer velocity, from first commit to production deployment.
• Own the engineering organization's observability and telemetry strategy, providing and managing centralized platforms for logging, monitoring, and alerting that enable rapid diagnostics and high system reliability.
• Evaluate, select, and implement next-generation tools, automation frameworks, and AI-driven development practices that measurably improve engineering efficiency, product quality, and stability.
• Define, instrument, and own the key performance and product quality indicators for the entire engineering organization.
• Establish and maintain executive-level dashboards and reporting to provide a single, authoritative source of truth for engineering performance, productivity, and platform resilience.
• Utilize this data to identify systemic bottlenecks, drive data-informed process improvements, and report to executive leadership on the business impact of engineering investments and platform health.
• Serve as the primary executive partner to Engineering, Product, and Operations leadership, ensuring strategic alignment on release scheduling, risk mitigation, and platform initiatives.
• Translate complex technical concepts, platform health metrics, and productivity data into clear, persuasive business implications for C-suite leadership and key stakeholders.
• Own and manage resource allocation, vendor relationships, and long-range planning for the Engineering Productivity and Quality organization.
• Recruit, lead, and mentor a world-class, of platform, automation, systems, and developer-experience engineers across multiple locations.
• Foster a culture of high performance, psychological safety, and continuous learning, dedicated to attracting and retaining the "highest concentration of talent".
• Develop scalable career frameworks and mentorship programs to grow the next generation of engineering leaders at C3 AI.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related STEM field.
• 15+ years of experience in software engineering and/or engineering management, with at least 7+ years in a senior leadership role (Director or VP) managing functions such as Quality Engineering, Developer Experience, Site Reliability Engineering, Release Engineering, or Engineering Productivity.
• Proven track record of architecting, building, and scaling engineering-wide systems and developer tooling.
• Deep expertise in modern cloud-native ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and managing complex distributed systems at scale.
• Strong, foundational background in software development (e.g., Java, Python, JavaScript) with a systems-level architectural perspective.
• Exceptional executive presence, with the ability to influence and engage stakeholders at all levels, from C-suite to individual engineers.
• Demonstrable experience driving large-scale organizational change and implementing modern engineering practices.
• Strong business acumen with experience in aligning engineering initiatives with business outcomes.
• Self-starter with an entrepreneurial drive and demonstrated ability to achieve stretch goals in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Graduate degree in a Science, Technology, Engineering, Management, or Math (STEM) field, or an MBA.
• Deep familiarity with Big Data systems and the challenges of large-scale data platforms.
• Experience with the unique platform and reliability challenges of building and maintaining Enterprise AI and Machine Learning systems.
• Experience managing globally distributed engineering teams.