Director of Software Engineering

About the position

The Director of Software Engineering leads the software engineering team and oversees the full software development lifecycle for all Guardian software applications and products. The Director of Software Engineering owns all system integrations, data engineering, and will drive innovation and excellence in our customer and employee experience while providing the analytics required to measure the outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a team of software engineers, ensuring project goals are met, products are delivered efficiently while meeting high-quality standards, and overall alignment with Guardian's long-term goals.
• Drives the software strategy for the entire organization.
• Consults with management regarding project specifics and determine requirements, boundaries and priorities.
• Provide effective employee performance management utilizing SMART goals, constructive feedback and coaching for improvement.
• Oversee the design, development, and implementation of all new software systems and/or enhancements to current software systems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, product vendors, and solution architects to translate business requests into work items for the development teams to implement.
• Develop and implement best practices for software development, ensuring scalability and reliability.
• Effectively manage vendors to maximize value.
• Maintain an excellent understanding of the business long term goals and strategy to ensure that designs are aligned.
• Manage resource allocation, budgeting, and long-term planning for the software team.
• Inspire and motivate the development teams to deliver innovative and exciting solutions with an appropriate sense of urgency.
• Assume a leadership role in ensuring on-time, high-quality delivery of products through the entire application life cycle.
• Foster and maintain a culture of design excellence, innovation, quality, collaboration, planning, continuous improvement and responsiveness in the software engineering team.
• Work closely with Executive leadership to design and architect major customer features.
• Act as a strategist and champion for enterprise architecture and design principles.
• Ensure adherence to continuous improvement practices as required to meet quality and time to market imperatives.
• Report on the status of development, quality, operations, and system performance.
• Develop tools to improve our ability to rapidly deploy and effectively monitor custom applications in cloud-hosted Azure and/or AWS environments.
• Drive the data engineering effort ensuring the availability and quality of data to the business.
• Review new and existing systems design projects and procurement or outsourcing plans for compliance with standards and architectural plans.

Requirements

• Strong people management skills, proven success in recruiting, creating and motivating a strong performing engineering team.
• Understanding of cloud based development methodologies and state of the art design patterns.
• Proficient with software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodologies like Agile, Test-driven development.
• A positive attitude with a service delivery mentality.
• Ability to work independently and supervise a diverse staff.
• Ability to demonstrate initiative and strong technical knowledge.
• Ability to coach/mentor IT staff members to function as a highly effective team.
• Enthusiasm for investigating and implementing new software tools/applications (off the shelf and internally developed).
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or any other relevant field required.
• 3+ years of direct management experience of at least 5 on-site engineers.
• At least 5 years' experience in developing scalable web applications and architectural standards.
• Proficient in at least one strongly-typed language (Java, C/C++, C#, etc).
• Experience with Javascript, Python, C++, or Go.
• Experience with Agile software development.
• Experience with Microsoft Dynamics environment.
• Experience with Azure and the available data related products such as data factory, pipelines, OneLake and Fabric.
• PowerBI or SQL experience.
• 4+ years of engineering leadership experience - managing multiple teams and/or locations.