Director Software Engineering

About BrightStar

BrightStar is a global provider of lottery platforms and systems for state lottery operators across four continents. We build and operate mission-critical software that powers the sale, management, and settlement of lottery products — serving millions of players through our clients’ retail and digital networks.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Director of Software Engineering to lead the engineering organization responsible for the development, scalability, and long-term evolution of one of business-critical products within BrightStar’s lottery technology portfolio.

This role combines strategic technology leadership, people management, product delivery ownership, and strong cross-functional collaboration. The successful candidate will be accountable for building and leading high-performing engineering teams, driving predictable delivery of the product roadmap, ensuring technical excellence, and partnering closely with Product, Architecture, Delivery, Operations, Security, and senior business stakeholders.

The Director of Software Engineering reports to the VP of Product Software Engineering and operates as part of a leadership team that is actively building a more predictable, ownership-driven engineering organization.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership

• Lead the software engineering function responsible for the product, including software development, quality engineering, technical delivery, and engineering operations.

• Define and execute the engineering strategy for the product in alignment with BrightStar’s platform transformation, product strategy, business priorities, and customer needs.

• Build, lead, and develop high-performing engineering teams, including Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Software Engineers, and QA / Test Automation specialists.

• Create clear ownership, accountability, and decision-making structures across teams.

• Drive a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, transparency, continuous improvement, and outcome orientation.

• Coach and mentor engineering leaders and senior technical talent, supporting succession planning and leadership development.

Product Delivery and Execution

• Own engineering delivery against the product roadmap, ensuring predictable execution, clear prioritization, and measurable outcomes.

• Partner with Product Management to translate business needs, client requirements, and market opportunities into scalable and technically sound product capabilities.

• Ensure effective planning, estimation, dependency management, release governance, and delivery reporting.

• Identify and remove delivery bottlenecks across teams, processes, architecture, and stakeholder alignment.

• Establish and monitor key engineering metrics, including delivery predictability, quality, reliability, cycle time, defect trends, system performance, and team health.

• Balance new feature development with technical debt reduction, platform modernization, and operational stability.

Architecture, Quality and Reliability

• Provide leadership over architectural direction, design standards, and engineering best practices for the product.

• Support BrightStar’s shift toward a modular, cloud-native product platform by promoting reuse, standardization, configurability, and scalable architecture.

• Ensure the product is scalable, secure, maintainable, observable, and resilient.

• Promote modern software engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, DevOps, observability, secure development lifecycle, and cloud-native engineering.

• Work closely with Architecture, Security, Infrastructure / Cloud, and Operations teams to ensure alignment on platform strategy, non-functional requirements, and production readiness.

• Drive continuous improvement in software quality, test automation, incident prevention, and root-cause analysis.

• Ensure compliance with relevant security, data protection, audit, and regulatory requirements applicable to lottery systems and public-sector clients.

Stakeholder and Business Collaboration

• Act as the primary engineering partner for Product, Operations, Delivery, Sales, and senior leadership stakeholders.

• Communicate engineering plans, risks, trade-offs, and delivery progress clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Support customer-facing discussions where senior technical credibility is required, especially around scalability, reliability, roadmap feasibility, delivery risk, or complex implementation topics.

• Collaborate with global or distributed teams, ensuring alignment across locations, time zones, and functions.

• Represent the engineering organization in strategic planning, budgeting, portfolio prioritization, and transformation discussions.

People, Organization and Talent

• Define the target engineering organization structure required to support current delivery needs and future platform growth.

• Recruit, retain, and develop strong engineering talent.

• Set performance expectations, conduct talent reviews, and support career development for managers and senior engineers.

• Build an inclusive, accountable, and high-performance engineering culture.

• Manage internal teams and, where relevant, external technology partners, contractors, or vendors.

• Support workforce planning, budget management, and capacity planning for the engineering function.

Required Experience and Qualifications

• 10–15+ years of professional experience in software engineering, including significant experience in product-oriented software development.

• Minimum 5 years of experience leading engineering teams, preferably including managers, tech leads, or multi-team structures.

• Experience in a role such as Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, Senior Engineering Manager, VP Engineering, or equivalent.

• Proven track record of delivering complex software products or platforms in scalable, reliable, and secure environments.

• Strong understanding of modern software architecture, SDLC, agile delivery, DevOps, CI/CD, test automation, and engineering quality practices.

• Experience managing engineering delivery in a product organization, preferably in SaaS, fintech, gaming / lottery technology, ticketing, e-commerce, payments, enterprise software, or another high-volume transactional environment.

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure.

• Experience with microservices, APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architecture, or real-time processing.

• Ability to make sound technology and prioritization decisions under ambiguity and business pressure.

• Strong people leadership skills, including coaching, performance management, organizational design, and talent development.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to work effectively with executive-level stakeholders.

• Fluent English. 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field. Equivalent professional experience will also be considered. Master’s degree or MBA is an advantage.

• Location: Warsaw, Poland - on-site presence required (hybrid mode).