VP, Product Engineering (Software)

Scientific Games is the global leader in lottery games, sports betting and technology, and the partner of choice for government lotteries. From cutting-edge backend systems to exciting entertainment experiences and trailblazing retail and digital solutions, we elevate play every day. We push game designs to the next level and are pioneers in data analytics and iLottery. Built on a foundation of trusted partnerships, Scientific Games combines relentless innovation, legendary performance, and unwavering security to responsibly propel the global lottery industry ever forward.

What This Person Will Own

• Building new products, capabilities, prototypes, and production systems from zero to one.

• Moving quickly and safely inside existing legacy codebases and platforms.

• Helping decide which opportunities deserve engineering investment.

• Creating an AI-first software delivery model based on clear specifications, acceptance criteria, automated tests, fast feedback, and low cycle time.

• Using current AI development tools and emerging agentic workflows to generate code, write and improve tests, explore legacy systems, document behavior, accelerate migrations, support review, and reduce manual toil.

• Establishing specification-driven development, test-driven development, acceptance-test-driven development, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, release discipline, security review, and production ownership as the foundation for speed.

• Building a small, high-performance team with a strong bar for technical judgment, product judgment, learning speed, and follow-through.

• Modeling agentic AI development patterns that can influence engineering practice across SG.

What Success Looks Like

This person will lead a team that turns ambiguity into working software quickly and safely. The team operates close to the customer and uses AI effectively to accelerate delivery—while maintaining strong engineering fundamentals.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead product engineering for strategic new business opportunities, from problem framing through prototype, validation, production readiness, and scale.

• Partner with product and business leaders to decide what is worth building, what should be built first, and how success will be measured.

• Build and lead a small, high-performance engineering team with strong technical judgment, product judgment, ownership, and learning speed.

• Establish an AI-first development model grounded in clear specs, TDD / ATDD, automated testing, fast feedback loops, CI/CD, observability, and production-safe release practices.

• Move quickly inside legacy systems while improving the parts of the platform the team touches: cleaner interfaces, better tests, stronger automation, and less future drag.

• Model a faster, safer product engineering motion for SG by showing how AI-assisted development, strong specs, strong tests, and low cycle time can work together at enterprise scale.

Required Experience Includes:

• Leading end-to-end product engineering: problem framing, technical design, implementation, testing, release, production operation, and iteration.

• Building new products, platforms, or capabilities from early ambiguity to production use.

• Working in or around legacy systems while improving architecture, testability, operability, and delivery speed.

• Using modern AI-assisted software development practices, including coding assistants, agentic workflows, AI-assisted code generation and review, test generation, documentation support, migration support, and workflow automation.

• Practicing specification-driven development: clear intent, acceptance criteria, interface contracts, examples, non-functional requirements, and release criteria.

• Building strong automated testing systems, including TDD, ATDD, unit testing, integration testing, contract testing, regression automation, performance testing, and production validation.

Useful Additional Experience Includes:

• Lottery, gaming, payments, regulated transactional systems, or other high-reliability customer-facing platform experience.

• Polyglot environments with multiple languages, platforms, deployment models, and legacy architectures.

• Cloud-native development, platform engineering, infrastructure as code, containerized workloads, APIs, event-driven systems, and distributed systems.

• Test automation across unit, integration, contract, regression, performance, and end-to-end testing

Work Conditions

Scientific Games, LLC and its affiliates (collectively, “SG”) are engaged in highly regulated gaming and lottery businesses.   As a result, certain SG employees may, among other things, be required to obtain a gaming or other license(s), undergo background investigations or security checks, or meet certain standards dictated by law, regulation or contracts.   In order to ensure SG complies with its regulatory and contractual commitments, as a condition to hiring and continuing to employ its employees, SG requires all of its employees to meet those requirements that are necessary to fulfill their individual roles.  As a prerequisite to employment with SG (to the extent permitted by law), you shall be asked to consent to SG conducting a due diligence/background investigation on you.
This job description should not be interpreted as all-inclusive; it is intended to identify major responsibilities and requirements of the job. The employee in this position may be requested to perform other job-related tasks and responsibilities than those stated above. 

SG is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate against applicants due to race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class. If you’d like more information about your equal employment opportunity rights as an applicant under the law, please click here for EEOC Poster.