Vice President, Software Engineering

Learfield · Dallas

SIDEARM is the digital home of college athletics: the websites, the apps, the live video, the live stats, the content that turns a game into a season and a season into a lifelong allegiance. We are now rebuilding that platform from the ground up — and we are hiring the engineering leader who will lead us into the future. As Vice President of Software Engineering, you lead a team of 35+ engineers and own every software engineering discipline at SIDEARM — web, mobile, API and platform — and you are accountable for the craft, speed and reliability of everything we ship. You report to Learfield's Chief Data and Technology Officer and sit on the SIDEARM leadership team. This is a builder's seat. You will set the engineering pace, grow the people who meet it, and deliver a modern platform that carries college sports fandom for the next decade. Game day does not move for your release schedule, and that is exactly what makes this job fun.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

The Mandate

AI-first. Embrace agentic AI in the PDLC and establish the right agents, the right governance and the right outcomes, at a pace that wows our schools and their fans.
Rebuild the platform. Lead the complete re-architecture of SIDEARM's products onto a modern CMS and cloud-native foundation, with a delivery pipeline that makes releasing routine.
Make SIDEARM a world-class software organization. Install the practices that separate great software companies from the rest — technical standards, review and testing discipline, on-call and incident rigor, measurable quality, and career paths that attract and keep senior engineers.
Run at game-day scale. College athletics traffic does not arrive smoothly — it arrives in a wall. Kickoff, a selection show, a buzzer-beater, signing day. Own the instrumentation, the performance and the capacity model that absorb those peaks and keep the app fast on a phone in a packed stadium with three bars of nothing.
Partner with product from the first sketch. Sit with product leaders at the earliest stage of design — shaping what is feasible, what it costs, and what can ship this quarter versus next — so engineering is a co-author of the roadmap rather than a downstream estimator.
Make content, video and fan engagement the sharpest part of the product. Fandom is built on what fans watch and read between games, not only on what happens during them. Build the streaming, content and personalization systems that let athletics departments publish faster, stream cleaner and know their fans.

What You Will Own

Architecture and cloud. The target architecture and the migration path to it: service boundaries, API contracts, data flow, multi-tenancy for 1,600+ partners, cost per transaction, and the build-versus-buy calls that go with it.
Performance at scale. Instrumentation, SLOs and error budgets; Core Web Vitals and app start-up times; load and chaos testing ahead of peak events; and a habit of measuring before and after every change.
Quality. Automated test coverage where it pays, release gates, defect escape rate, and a production incident process that produces fixes rather than blame.
Mobile and web delivery. Native app release trains through both stores, web release cadence, and a shared platform underneath both so a feature is built once.
AI and data in the product and the process. Where machine learning and generative AI genuinely improve fan experience, content operations and partner tooling — and where they improve how the team itself designs, codes, tests and reviews.
Security, privacy and resilience. Secure development practices, accessibility obligations that come with serving public institutions, and disaster recovery that has been tested.

Minimum Qualifications:

12+ years in software engineering with 6+ leading engineers, including experience leading leaders — managers and senior managers reporting to you, not only individual contributors.
AI and data literacy. A practical grasp of how agentic AI accelerates engineering delivery, and how data pipelines and LLMs create product value and engineering leverage.
A platform you rebuilt or scaled. You have taken a real product from legacy to modern architecture or scaled one through an order-of-magnitude increase in traffic, and you can describe the sequencing decisions and the ones you would make differently.
Cloud architecture depth. Hands-on judgment about distributed systems on a major cloud: service decomposition, API design, caching and CDN strategy, data stores, event-driven patterns, multi-tenancy and cost control. You can still read the architecture diagram critically.
Performance engineering. You instrument before you optimize. You have owned SLOs, latency and capacity planning for systems with sharp, predictable traffic peaks.
Web and mobile, both. Experience shipping and operating native mobile apps as well as web products — app store release management, mobile performance and crash rates, and a shared platform underneath both.
Modern stack fluency. Working command of technologies such as React, Node.js, TypeScript, Java or comparable, plus the API and data layers behind them.
Quality as a system. A track record of measurably improving quality — defect rate, incident frequency, test automation, MTTR.
Product partnership. Experience working with product leaders at the earliest stage of design, shaping feasibility, cost and sequencing before a spec is written.
Talent building. Demonstrated hiring, development and retention of strong engineers in a competitive market.

Preferred Qualifications:

Sports, media, live events or entertainment technology — anything where traffic arrives in waves and the content is time-sensitive.
Live video streaming, real-time data or content management at scale.
Multi-tenant SaaS serving hundreds or thousands of customer brands from a shared platform.

Learfield offers a full spectrum of benefits for eligible employees including Medical, Dental, Vision, Health Savings Account, Life Insurance and Other Insurance Plans, Flexible Paid Time Off (minimum 10+ days annually), including Parental Leave, 20 Paid Holidays, 401(k) + Match, and Short/Long Term Disability. Leave benefits are consistent with state and local laws, including the Colorado Health Families and Workplaces Act.

Learfield is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We provide equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race; color; sex; gender identity; sexual orientation; religious practices and observances; national origin; pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; status as a protected veteran or spouse/family member of a protected veteran; or disability.

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