Director of Software Development

Position Summary

The Director of Software Development provides both strategic and technical leadership for organization's enterprise application portfolio, leading engineering execution across the full software development lifecycle in partnership with business stakeholders, product owners, and IT leadership.

Reporting to the Executive Director of Information Technology, the Director of Software Development leads a growing team of software engineers and is responsible for managing both internal staff and external development partners. The role is accountable for application architecture, engineering quality, platform modernization, delivery excellence, and the long-term sustainability of the organization's software platforms.

This is a technical leadership position. While the Director of Software Development

Primary Responsibilities

• Lead the design, delivery, and operation of organization's enterprise application platforms.
• Provide engineering leadership across the full software development lifecycle in partnership with product owners, business stakeholders, and other IT teams.
• Build, develop, and retain a high-performing Software Engineering team through hiring, coaching, performance management, succession planning, and professional development.
• Participate directly in architecture, system design, and key technical decision-making.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for software design, code quality, testing, CI/CD, security, and development practices.
• Work alongside engineering teams to diagnose and resolve complex production, performance, reliability, and integration issues.
• Define and execute the application modernization strategy, including cloud-native architecture, API-first design, and containerized platforms.
• Partner with Infrastructure & Security to ensure applications meet availability, monitoring, deployment, disaster recovery, and operational support requirements for 24/7 business operations.
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs involving performance, security, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and cost.
• Manage software vendors, consultants, and external development partners to ensure quality delivery and effective use of resources.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, including AI-assisted software engineering tools that improve productivity, software quality, security, and operational efficiency.
• Maintain sufficient technical depth across the application portfolio to guide engineering decisions and hold teams and vendors accountable for technical outcomes.
• Contribute to overall IT strategy in partnership with the Data Platform, Infrastructure & Security, and Solution Delivery teams.
• Champion organization's mission, values, and collaborative culture.

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate is an experienced engineering leader who combines strong people leadership with technical credibility and delivery excellence.

They provide strategic direction for engineering practices and platform evolution while maintaining the technical depth to evaluate architecture, challenge assumptions, assess engineering trade-offs, and ensure solutions are scalable, secure, reliable, and aligned with Agency objectives.

They are comfortable engaging directly with engineers on architecture, code quality, incidents, and technical debt while empowering technical leads and development teams to own day-to-day execution. They communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences and build strong partnerships across application, data, infrastructure, and business teams.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressively responsible software development experience supporting production applications.
• 5+ years leading software engineering teams with responsibility for delivery, hiring, coaching, performance management, and organizational outcomes.
• Experience managing teams consisting of employees, consultants, and external development partners.
• Recent hands-on technical leadership experience, including architecture, design reviews, implementation guidance, and production troubleshooting.
• Ability to review source code, APIs, system designs, deployment configurations, and data flows.
• Experience owning enterprise application platforms in production, including managing technical debt and long-term platform evolution.
• Experience supporting highly available or mission-critical business systems.
• Strong experience with cloud platforms and distributed systems, preferably Microsoft Azure.
• Experience with containerized and cloud-native environments such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience integrating enterprise applications and third-party platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers through direct technical leadership.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with both technical and business audiences.
• Experience working in regulated, public sector, healthcare, financial, or other high-accountability environments is preferred.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Ability to successfully pass a background investigation and work a hybrid schedule.

Preferred Technical Experience

Experience with C#/.NET, modern web development frameworks, Microsoft Azure, RESTful APIs, relational databases, containerization, Kubernetes, and AI-assisted software engineering tools. Candidates with comparable experience using other modern technology stacks are encouraged to apply if they can demonstrate the ability to quickly adapt to a Microsoft-centered environment.