Assistant Director, Software Engineering - Real Estate

About the Role
The Assistant Director, Software Engineering, owns end-to-end technical quality and delivery execution across UI, services, and data platforms. This role is accountable for technical direction, delivery excellence, and people leadership for the Real Estate engineering teams.
This role requires current, hands-on experience architecting React frontends and designing and building backend REST APIs, along with an understanding of database performance tuning, dimensional warehouse models, and data transformations involving slowly changing dimensions (SCDs).
You will lead engineers directly while partnering closely with Product Managers, Architects, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and supportable solutions aligned with the team’s objectives. You are both a technical authority and a people leader, setting direction, raising standards, and developing engineering talent. Your technical experience should enable you to engage directly in architecture discussions, implementation decisions, code reviews, and performance troubleshooting, rather than relying solely on prior oversight of these technologies.
What You’ll Do in the Role
Technical Leadership & Delivery

• Define and communicate technical direction for the Real Estate team, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, security, and delivery standards.
• Translate product and business outcomes into pragmatic technical designs and implementation plans.
• Lead frontend architecture and implementation using React, guiding component design, state management, application structure, API integration, and frontend performance.
• Lead the design, development, and implementation of backend services and REST APIs using Node.js, establishing clear interface contracts and secure, scalable, and maintainable service patterns.
• Guide solution design across React frontends, backend APIs, and data platforms such as dbt and Snowflake, maintaining clear integration boundaries and data lineage.
• Drive technical decomposition and sequencing for initiatives spanning applications, APIs, pipelines, and warehouse models.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and operational readiness.
• Own technical risk management, including early identification of architecture, integration, performance, and security risks.
• Ensure API and data integrations are resilient, well-documented, and reusable across teams.
• Guide the design and review of dimensional warehouse models and data transformations, including slowly changing dimension patterns and their implications for historical accuracy, processing efficiency, and query performance.
• Partner with engineers to identify and address database and warehouse performance bottlenecks across queries, transformations, and incremental data-processing workloads, balancing reliability, maintainability, and cost.
• Support production stability by guiding incident response, root-cause analysis, and preventive engineering improvements.

People Leadership & Team Development

• Serve as direct people leader for engineers, responsible for coaching, growth, performance management, and career development.
• Build a strong engineering culture centered on ownership, quality, learning, and constructive feedback.
• Lead regular technical and delivery reviews, fostering a healthy review and mentorship culture.
• Develop team capability through coaching, pairing, and intentional skills development.
• Partner with Engineering Management on hiring, onboarding, and succession planning.
• Set clear expectations and accountability for technical excellence, delivery outcomes, and operational readiness.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product Managers to balance delivery speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.
• Coordinate cross-team dependencies and release readiness for shared components, platforms, and data pipelines.
• Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture and other investment delivery teams’ Technical Leads to align standards, patterns, and roadmaps.
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, providing clarity under ambiguity.

What You’ll Bring to the Role

• 8+ years of software and data engineering experience, with strong full-stack and data platform expertise.
• Prior experience leading engineers directly or demonstrated readiness to step into people leadership.
• Proven technical leadership across multiple teams or complex cross-functional initiatives.
• Current, hands-on experience architecting and building production React applications, including component architecture, state management, API integration, and frontend performance optimization.
• Current, hands-on experience designing and building backend services and REST APIs, including implementation using Node.js. Experience must extend beyond consuming APIs or overseeing service development.
• Strong understanding of dimensional data warehousing and transformation design, including slowly changing dimension types and their application to historical data management.
• Practical understanding of database and warehouse performance tuning, including how query design, warehouse models, and transformation patterns affect performance and cost.
• Ability to guide technical troubleshooting and optimization of data transformations and warehouse workloads in environments using dbt and Snowflake.
• Experience with cost-aware design and data governance controls.
• Experience designing secure, scalable, and observable systems in enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and elevate engineering maturity.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience in investment services domains.
• Experience modernizing legacy applications and data pipelines.
• Experience with platform migration programs and phased cutover strategies.
• Experience defining shared engineering standards across multiple teams.

Skills You Have

• Databases & Data Platforms: Advanced
• Data Interpretation: Advanced
• Adaptive Communication: Advanced
• Engineering Expertise & Practices: Advanced
• Talent Development & Planning: Advanced
• Coaching & Mentoring: Expert
• Product Roadmap: Advanced

#LI-Hybrid

Compensation Range:

Pay Range - Start:

$176,000.00

Pay Range - End:

$264,000.00

Geographic Specific Pay Structure:

Structure 110:

$193,600.00 USD - $290,400.00 USD

Structure 115:

$202,400.00 USD - $303,600.00 USD

We believe in fairness and transparency. It’s why we share the salary range for most of our roles. However, final salaries are based on a number of factors, including the skills and experience of the candidate; the current market; location of the candidate; and other factors uncovered in the hiring process. The standard pay structure is listed but if you’re living in California, New York City or other eligible location, geographic specific pay structures, compensation and benefits could be applicable, click here to learn more.

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Northwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer that welcomes talented individuals of all backgrounds. We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.