Senior Director, Software Engineering

We are currently looking for a Sr Director, Software Engineering who craves a role encompassing a diverse range of responsibilities that will support their ongoing growth and development, spanning from day-to-day operations to exciting projects and initiatives.

The Sr. Director, Software Engineering understands the business and the business strategy to develop the enterprise architecture strategy. This director not only leads the engineering team technically, to drive excellence in software development, but also handles all administrative and career duties associated with software engineering teams. In addition to managing day to day operations of software engineering team, the role is also responsible to interface with the product management, project management, professional services, and business teams on a regular basis to ensure execution, management and delivery of software systems and applications. This role will plan, coordinate, direct, and design all operational activities of the IT department. This role also helps to provide vision and leadership for developing and implementing information technology initiatives across all areas of the organization.

Responsibilities:

Strategy & Planning

• Lead IT strategic and operational planning to achieve business goals by fostering innovation, prioritizing IT initiatives, and coordinating the evaluation, deployment, and management of current and future IT systems across the organization.
• Develop and maintain an appropriate IT organizational structure that supports the needs of the business.
• Establish IT departmental goals, objectives, and operating procedures.
• Establish lines of control for current and proposed information systems.

Acquisition & Deployment

• Identify opportunities for the appropriate and cost-effective investment of financial resources in IT systems and resources, including staffing, sourcing, purchasing, and in-house development.
• Keep current with trends and issues in the IT industry, including current technologies and prices.
• Supervise recruitment, development, retention, and organization of IT staff in accordance with corporate budgetary objectives and personnel policies.

Operational Management

• Develop clear vision, goals, and objectives for the department that support company goals and objectives and keep team members focused on high performance
• Develop lead and lag measures for the team, and keep them focused on improving these measures
• Implement a strategy for the department to examine and improve key processes used every day
• Develop clear departmental strategy to achieve measurable and financial goals
• Coordinate team member scheduling and staffing to ensure excellent customer service and response is achieved
• Provide relevant reports and presentations to executive management to help drive successful decision making for the company now and in the future
• Regularly evaluate competing assignments and be flexible in shifting priorities or schedules to support the business
• Effectively communicates issues and risks to IT leadership
• Comfortably deal with ambiguous assignments, utilizing strong problem solving and creativity to recommend or implement successful solutions
• Demonstrate servant leadership, striving to make the team and team members successful through assistance and encouragement
• Manage all personnel aspects for the engineering team, including organization structure, job descriptions, career development, compensation, conflict resolution, hiring, termination, etc.
• Manage all personnel aspects for team members sourced through third party relationships
• Understand initiatives and lead by example to establish credibility
• Develop business case justifications and cost/benefit analyses for IT spending and initiatives.
• Coordinate and facilitate consultation with stakeholders to define business and systems requirements for new technology implementations.
• Ensure continuous delivery of IT services through oversight of service level agreements with end users and monitoring of IT systems performance.

Policies, Procedures, Methodologies

• Directly supervise a team of skilled professionals, developing design specifications for software development projects, project management, managing budgets and schedules, analyze client/vendor technology requirements and making recommendations to the organization as to future development efforts
• Participate in operational and strategic planning efforts
• Establish and document the policies and procedures for the engineering team
• Develop organizational structure that optimizes software delivery
• Train and lead team members in software delivery optimization
• Provide architectural and technical guidance to team members
• Ensure sound engineering design, process and quality practices are followed

Enterprise Architecture

• Utilize business knowledge to appropriately define and maintain the architecture strategy; build strong partnerships within the business to ensure architecture is aligned with key business processes
• Drive and define enterprise frameworks to support the business and technology strategy; frameworks should enable a flexible service-oriented architecture that encourages reusability and achieves necessary performance standards
• Create software design specifications
• Develop architecture and development best practices that support the business and technology strategy
• Develop enterprise architecture documentation, including as-is architecture, to-be architecture, architectural roadmaps, and technology standards
• Provides strategic technical vision and leadership

Execution

• Estimate timelines and durations of projects, monitor the progress of software development projects, supervise the work quality and quantity of the team
• Manage the technical coordination and distribution of work amongst all software engineering teams
• Own issues until completion, regardless of who should be responsible; place technology team success ahead of individual projects; serve as a primary leader across the technology team
• Proactively seek out issues and find solutions; seek opportunities for improvement and drive change until optimization is achieved
• Proactively and continuously work with technology group to identify ways to optimize delivery of solutions to the business and customers with respect to quality, speed, throughput, and reusability
• Consistently pay attention to detail, following up on tasks and not letting things fall between the cracks
• Consistently refresh skill set and does not assume complete and current knowledge of technology trends, opportunities, and challenges

Position Requirements:

Formal Education & Certification

Bachelors degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience required

Knowledge & Experience

• Seven plus years of combined experience in solution and/or enterprise architecture
• Five plus years supervising software engineering personnel
• Experience leading software engineering teams in support of operations functions as well as project work
• Demonstrated skill in aligning technology strategy with business requirements
• Experience communicating and negotiating directly with third parties including clients and vendors
• 7+ years of demonstrated knowledge and experience integrating software applications using the primary technology area where the expertise is desired
• Demonstrated experience with assessing an existing software development platform, identifying areas of improvement and executing on projects to improve the overall quality and scalability of the platform Good understanding of software development lifecycle SDLC) and related tools and expertise in understanding of RDBMS's and optimization techniques
• Demonstrated experience of leading a team of developers in the technology domain where key expertise is desired
• 3+ years of demonstrated experience with development, testing and deployment of web based software solutions across all application tiers
• 5+ years of experience leading Agile teams

Qualifications & Characteristics

• Ability to manage multiple responsibilities, while effectively focusing on priority issues
• Ability to manage time appropriately while maintaining transparency
• Ability to quickly learn the company's SDLC and determine the best way to lead a team to achieve high velocity with quality within the SDLC process
• Aptitude for designing and coding software and a desire to do quality work
• Aptitude to learn new technologies to support business requirements
• Strong familiarity with project planning, plan execution, project health reporting for
• 7+ years of demonstrated knowledge and experience integrating software applications using the primary technology area where the expertise is desired
• Demonstrated experience with assessing an existing software development platform, identifying areas of improvement and executing on projects to improve the overall quality and scalability of the platform
• Good understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and related tools and expertise in understanding of RDBMS's and optimization techniques
• Demonstrated experience of leading a team of developers in the technology domain where key expertise is desired
• 3+ years of demonstrated experience with development, testing and deployment of web based software solutions across all application tiers
• systems implementations
• Strong familiarity with project management methodologies such as Agile and Waterfall and flexibility to adapt to most appropriate methodology for the situation
• Ability to serve as a solution evangelist
• Ability to provide strong leadership capabilities
• Ability to effectively weigh priorities and be decisive in a high-pressure environment
• Ability to motivate team members to achieve success
• Good analytical and problem-solving abilities
• Ability to present ideas in business-friendly and user-friendly language
• Excellent written, oral, interpersonal, and presentational skills
• Experience working in a team-oriented, collaborative environment