Vice President of Software Engineering
Magnals · Remote
Magna Legal Services is a trusted nationwide partner to law firms, corporations, insurance carriers, and government agencies, delivering comprehensive legal support at every stage of a case. From court reporting and record retrieval to jury consulting, investigations, litigation graphics, and language services, we help our clients navigate complex legal challenges with confidence. Our reputation is built on the expertise, dedication, and professionalism of our team, and we’re proud to foster a culture where talented people can do meaningful work and grow their careers.
Magna Legal Services is seeking a Vice President of Software Engineering to lead the teams responsible for building, operating, and evolving the software platforms that support our legal-services businesses. This leader will oversee software engineering people, processes, and execution across Magna's full suite of product offerings, shared platform capabilities, and emerging AI-enabled solutions.
Reporting directly to Magna's Chief Technology Officer, the Head of Software Engineering will translate business and product priorities into disciplined engineering plans, strengthen delivery and operational performance, and build an organization capable of scaling across multiple products and lines of business. Direct reports will include engineering managers, QA, DevOps/SRE, and architecture leads. The role will partner closely with the CTO, Product, Marketing, Operations, and go-to-market leaders.
This is a hands-on executive leadership role for someone who can operate at both the organizational and technical levels, deeply engaged in design reviews, technical tradeoffs, and incident resolution rather than day-to-day coding: developing leaders, improving delivery systems, guiding complex software initiatives, and ensuring that teams consistently produce secure, reliable, maintainable software. The CTO will continue to lead enterprise technical vision and architectural direction; the Head of Software Engineering will ensure that direction is translated into effective team structures, sound execution, and measurable results. This is a remote position within the United States.
This is a remote position within the United States. The Head of Software Engineering must be able to travel to Magna’s Philadelphia-area offices approximately 10% of the time. Travel may occasionally be scheduled on short notice or occur in consecutive weeks based on business needs. Candidates with convenient access to Philadelphia are preferred.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Lead Magna's software engineering organization across multiple products and lines of business.
- Develop and coach engineering managers, senior technical leaders, and individual contributors, establishing clear accountability and high performance at every level.
- Assess and evolve organizational structure, team capacity, role clarity, and leadership coverage as the portfolio grows.
- Own workforce planning, hiring, onboarding, performance management, succession planning, career development, the engineering budget, and vendor and contractor relationships for software engineering.
- Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, continuous improvement, and direct, respectful communication.
- Balance durable product alignment with the ability to shift talent across shared components, high-priority initiatives, and changing business needs.
- Translate company, product, and business-line priorities into clear engineering roadmaps, staffing plans, and execution commitments.
- Establish a consistent operating cadence for planning, prioritization, estimation, delivery, release management, and executive reporting.
- Improve the predictability, speed, and transparency of software delivery while maintaining appropriate quality and risk controls.
- Proactively identify dependencies, resource constraints, delivery risks, and organizational blockers, and drive them to resolution.
- Define and monitor meaningful engineering measures related to delivery, quality, reliability, security, and team health.
- Ensure teams own software throughout its lifecycle, from problem definition and design through deployment, monitoring, support, incident response, and ongoing improvement.
- Guide the pragmatic modernization of legacy applications while protecting business continuity and customer experience.
- Lead the technical integration of acquired businesses and platforms into Magna's shared capabilities.
- Raise standards for software design, code quality, automated testing, observability, documentation, maintainability, and production readiness.
- Strengthen engineering practices across APIs, cloud services, distributed systems, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and secure software development.
- Ensure software meets the security, privacy, and compliance obligations that come with handling protected health information, personal data, and privileged legal material, including [HIPAA, SOC 2, and client security audits – confirm].
- Ensure teams make practical technology choices that fit the needs of each product while supporting appropriate reuse, interoperability, and shared platform capabilities.
- Maintain enough technical depth to evaluate tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, support incident resolution, and earn credibility with senior engineers and architects.
- Partner with Product and Design to create achievable roadmaps, clarify requirements, and balance customer value, technical health, and delivery capacity.
- Work closely with business, operations, and go-to-market leaders to translate legal services workflows and client needs into scalable software capabilities.
- Communicate plans, tradeoffs, risks, progress, and outcomes clearly to executive and nontechnical stakeholders.
- Create effective feedback loops between engineering teams and the internal users, clients, and business stakeholders who depend on Magna's products.
- Advance the responsible use of AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, quality, documentation, testing, and knowledge sharing.
- Partner with Product, the CTO, and technical leaders to evaluate and deliver practical AI and large-language-model capabilities within Magna's products and workflows, such as transcript summarization, deposition indexing, and medical record review.
- Establish appropriate engineering discipline around AI-enabled features, including evaluation, security, privacy, reliability, human oversight, and ongoing monitoring.
- Encourage thoughtful experimentation while ensuring AI investments remain connected to measurable customer and business outcomes.
What Success Looks Like in the First 12 Months:
- A predictable planning and release cadence, with delivery commitments met and reported transparently to executive leadership.
- A clear organizational design with strong leadership coverage across products and shared platforms.
- Measurable progress on Recordtrak and Maggie without disruption to clients.
- At least one AI-enabled capability in production with defined evaluation, monitoring, and human oversight.
Required Qualifications:
- 12+ years of progressive software-engineering experience, including 5+ years leading multiple teams or product areas.
- Demonstrated success building and leading high performing software engineering organizations, including managing managers.
- Track record of delivering complex, business-critical software while improving execution discipline, quality, and predictability.
- Strong understanding of modern software architecture, APIs, cloud platforms, distributed systems, CI/CD, observability, security, and production operations.
- Experience modernizing legacy systems incrementally while continuing to meet active business and customer commitments.
- Ability to lead effectively across a varied technology portfolio. Magna's core platforms are built primarily on Microsoft technologies (C#, .NET, Azure); working knowledge of this stack and of modern web, cloud, and data techno