Executive Director, Technology

About this role

About Endpoints News Media Company, LLC

Endpoints News, founded in 2016, is a leading news media company with a clear mission: to deliver the best news product in biopharma and be the essential daily read for industry leaders globally. Now a part of the Financial Times family, Endpoints News has 290,000+ registered readers and continues to grow its reach with breaking news, in-depth analysis, live and virtual events and award-winning journalism.

The Role

This is a leadership role. You lead the technology function across engineering, delivery and operations: setting the standard, making the calls, growing the people, running the work, and answering to the business for what it delivers.

You also ship. The team is small and everyone at Endpoints is an IC at some level, including the people who lead. You'll be in the codebase every week and carrying real work of your own, because that's how things get built here and because it's the only way to lead a team this size credibly.

You'll report to the SVP, Design, Product and Technology and work alongside them daily. A lot of the job is the two of you thinking out loud: what's worth building, what it would take, what it would cost. You'll help shape the technical strategy together (architecture direction, build-versus-buy, where the platform goes next), with the SVP owning the final call and the direction for product and design. The technical thinking is yours, and we'd much rather hear "here's how we could do that" than "here's why we can't".

You'll be the technology counterpart to editorial and commercial leadership. The remit is wider than engineering. Delivery, technical program management, the operational layer, the business systems the company runs on, and the vendors who extend the team all sit with you, and the team beneath you will grow to reflect that.

This role is based in the United States and is fully remote.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow the technology team across engineering, delivery and operations. Own the people side fully — hiring, performance, development and the hard conversations — and manage through a manager as the function scales.

• Shape the technical strategy with the SVP — architecture direction, build, buy and integrate calls, and where the platform needs to go next. The SVP owns the final decision; you own the thinking that informs it and the delivery that follows.

• Turn product direction into shipped work. Own everything between the outcome, standard and date and working software in production — scoping, technical requirements, sequencing, and the commitments we make back to editorial and business stakeholders.

• Run delivery across the technology function. Own the cadence, the dependencies and the visibility that lets the rest of the company know what's coming and when.

• Answer for what the team ships. Set the standard, review architecture and overrule it on technical grounds where required, and put mechanisms in place that catch problems before production.

• Ship code every week. The team is small and everyone here builds, including the people who lead. You'll carry real work of your own — the hard problems, the spikes that set direction, the things that have to land — alongside the team rather than above it.

• Stand up new products and evolve the existing ones across news, subscriptions and identity, data and events, including the wind-down of what the new platform replaces.

• Lead security across everything we run: what's exposed, who has access, what's still running that shouldn't be, third-party risk, and the response when something happens.

• Own the content and data spine. You and your team build the spine, not the surface: the interface is design's - our designers author the design system and ship it to production themselves. Shape the content model, keep the CMS moving, build the APIs and MCP services every surface and every team draws on, and finish that shift across the rest of the estate.

• Own the operational layer — environments, CI, previews, observability, and the road to production that lets a designer ship with confidence.

• Own the internal systems and tooling the business runs on — the integrations across CRM, events, email and subscriptions, and the services that let business teams work directly with our own data.

• Direct the contractors and vendors who extend the team, and hold their output to the same standard as our own.

• Get sound AI-assisted work from non-engineers live quickly, and know when it isn't sound.

• Partner with editorial and business leadership to turn ideas into shipped features at the pace a newsroom requires.

Technical Requirements

Our actual stack, not a generic list. We care more about depth than about covering every line.

Hands-on, Every week

• TypeScript, Node.js, modern tooling

• Payload CMS on PostgreSQL, or equivalent depth in a headless, code-first CMS

• Content modeling and API design — GraphQL and REST

• Next.js, and Astro with React islands

• Application security — authentication and authorization you can demonstrate are enforced, secrets management, dependency hygiene, least privilege

• LLM-native workflow — AI tools as a core part of how you and your team build, and knowing where not to use them

Depth you've built before, even where you now direct it

• Identity and payments — SSO/OIDC (we run Logto), Stripe, entitlements, paywall logic

• AWS — Lambda via OpenNext, S3, CloudFront, IAM, RDS — and containers on Kubernetes

• Security operations — attack surface and asset inventory, decommissioning, access lifecycle, credential rotation, logging that can answer a forensic question

• Incident response — containment, evidence, and reporting that states what the logs show

• Privacy and compliance — GDPR and CCPA, consent and tracking, data retention

• PHP, MySQL, Python/FastAPI, Elasticsearch, message brokers

What We're Looking For

• A leader first. 5+ years leading technical teams, including managing engineers directly and…