Senior Director, Engineering

Keystone is a premier economics, technology, and strategy consulting firm built to help companies lead through transformation. As breakthrough innovations reshape industries, redefine competition and change our society, complex and highly competitive ecosystems emerge. Keystone advises technology leaders, Fortune 100 companies, their legal counsel, and governments on business, economic, litigation, and regulatory strategy in relation to these innovations and competitive eco-systems. We operate globally from offices in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Dubai, and Washington, D.C. About the Role   We are seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead the architecture, software and application management, integrations, and reliability of the platforms that power how Keystone operates. As the firm expands its business lines and geographic reach — and grows the organization to meet our clients’ needs— the ability to scale the systems that support client delivery, operations, and corporate workflows is central to Keystone's ability to grow.   This role sits at the intersection of IT, Product, and Engineering, focused on evolving Keystone's technology stack into a coherent, resilient operating environment. Two priorities shape the near-term charter. First, investing thoughtfully in architecture for scale and resilience — hardening the integrations, data flows, and platform foundations the firm depends on, so the environment’s design incorporates growth as a leading tenet. Second, investing deliberately in AI as a source of leverage for consultants and operators — automating manual effort, accelerating workflows, and scaling the firm's collective capability.   The technology environment under spans a customer relationship management platform, a cloud financials and ERP platform, multiple frontier generative AI providers, hyperscaler cloud infrastructure, a cloud data warehouse, an enterprise productivity and collaboration suite, an enterprise content management platform, and a broader portfolio of third-party SaaS applications supporting client delivery, resource planning, knowledge management, HR, Finance and other corporate workflows.   This role partners with the head of VP of Technology to set the technical roadmap, drive DevOps and reliability practices, and ensure engineering delivers measurable business outcomes. It works closely with Product Management, Security, Cloud and AI leaders, and the business function leaders whose workflows depend on these systems every day.   You will take well-defined and ambiguous technical problems, shape them into architectural direction, engineering execution, and operational discipline that hold up at scale, and drive outcomes through a mix of leadership, hands-on judgment, vendor management, and stakeholder partnership.   This is a hybrid role with a minimum in office requirement of 3 days per week. What You'll Do   Engineering Ownership & Execution   Own the engineering charter for Keystone's platform portfolio end-to-end, from architectural direction through delivery, DevOps, and iteration.   Translate IT/Product and business priorities into clear technical roadmaps, system designs, and prioritized engineering backlogs.   Set the standards for how systems are designed, deployed, secured, and operated across the estate, so quality does not depend on which team happens to be building.   Contribute directly to critical decisions and hands-on judgment on prototypes, technical spikes, and complex integration work when it accelerates outcomes.   Lead a development team on execution of product and platform development efforts, establish dev ops practices and telemetry to monitor performance and identify issues proactively.    Architecture, Scale & Resilience   Own the multi-year technical architecture for Keystone's platform portfolio — the SaaS ecosystem, cloud infrastructure, data platform, integration fabric, and internally-built products — and evolve it as the firm scales into new geographies, practices, and consultant volumes.   Establish service level targets — availability, latency, recovery, data integrity — that reflect the criticality of each system to consultant delivery, client engagement, and corporate operations.   Drive a durable investment program in resilience: redundancy, failover, backup and recovery, disaster-recovery drills, capacity planning, and the retirement of brittle or single-threaded components before they fail under load.   Partner with Security and Compliance on architecture decisions that touch client data, cross-border data flows, identity, and access — making the secure path the default path.   AI Strategy & Enablement   Invest thoughtfully — favouring durable capability, measurable leverage, and responsible use over adoption for its own sake. Frame AI investment in terms of specific outcomes: hours returned to consultants, quality lifted, time-to-answer reduced, manual tasks eliminated.   Build and operate the internal platform that makes AI secure, cost-aware, and accessible — model access, prompt and context management, evaluation harnesses, guardrails, observability, and the connective tissue between AI and the firm's systems of record.   Establish patterns for embedding AI into consultant-facing and operational workflows so that adoption is fast, quality is measurable, and human review sits where it belongs.   Participate as a member of the AI Governance Committee for direction, policy and execution of the governance model for AI use — data handling, model choice, client-work considerations, and the internal policies that guide when and how AI is applied.   Integrations & DevOps   Own the integration fabric that connects Keystone's SaaS platforms, internally-built products, data warehouse, and AI capabilities into a coherent operating environment — so that a change of a client, project, or employee flows once and is reflec