Director of Software Engineering and Information Technology

The candidate hired for this position will work directly as an employee for one of Solution Street’s clients. This position is hybrid - a combination of onsite and remote. Candidates must be local to Northern Virginia and able to work from client’s office on a regular basis.

Job Summary

The Director establishes engineering policies and procedures while leading a small software team and being hands-on with the codebase. They direct, oversee, and contribute to the software engineering function in developing, releasing, and maintaining software applications for staff and customers. They also oversee our client’s information technology functions contracted to third parties. As our client’s senior technologist, the Director spans both strategic responsibilities—roadmap, budget, policy development, and contract negotiation—and active, hands-on software development.

Qualities we’re looking for:

• Technologist: Strong software engineering, architecture, and technology background with the ability to learn a business quickly and go deep into product and engineering solutions. Will have a DevOps mindset.

• Effective Communicator: Excellent listener, presenter, and communicator in writing and verbally; proven collaborator and decision-maker with senior leaders, peers, and staff.

• Valued Leader: Proven leadership and management expertise with internal team and external vendors.

• Partnership Attitude: A constant learner and builder of partnerships with other leaders that enable your team to stay abreast of best practices and solutions.

• Engaged: Hands-on, "roll up your sleeves" collaborative style of working.

• Bold: History of taking smart, calculated risks and aggressively leading through change.

• Achiever: Consistently attains and exceeds individual and team goals.

In this role you will:

• Lead and manage a small agile team of product-focused software & data engineers for our telecommunications industry client, for which the team is comprised of two in-house developers and multiple vendor consultants.

• Operate in a coach-player role: setting policy and leading a team, while staying active in development and production support.

• Continue the software architecture build-out of existing, in-progress, and anticipated future software products, with a focus on long-term consistency and maintainability. Partner with architects, product owners, data professionals, and software & data engineers, both on-staff and on-contract, to drive the implementation of new applications.

• Embrace and incubate emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and open-source products across all platforms, ensuring adherence to our client’s established technology architecture.

• Work to modernize existing tech stacks and data platforms, automate previously manual processes, and avoid technical debt.

• Act as a strategist and champion for enterprise architecture and design principles.

• Lead requirements-gathering and conduct design and code reviews to ensure compliance with best practices and standards.

• As the lead technologist, oversee the efforts of outsourced technology providers, including our client’s outsourced service providers for help desk, software development, and server hosting.

• Enjoy the rewards of working for a small and familial organization, where all share in the collective success of some of the brightest minds in the telecommunications industry.

Basic qualifications:

• Strong background in agile methodologies and ability to mentor others in their use.

• Five-plus recent years of experience developing across a full stack, including client/server interaction, databases, and web/mobile applications.

• At least four years’ experience building, leading, and mentoring software engineering teams.

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field of study, and/or evident commensurate experience.

• Deep understanding of modern deployment and development infrastructure: CI/CD, unit and end-to-end testing, and cloud/enterprise deployments.

• At least four years’ experience developing scalable web applications and architectural standards with Azure and/or AWS cloud services.

• Proficient in one or more languages such as .NET, C#, TypeScript/JavaScript and development frameworks such as Entity Framework and Angular. Familiarity with our client legacy technologies below.

About our client’s technology environment:

Our client’s small internal software team is supported by multiple contracted vendors who provide software development and user support, and for which our client wishes to possess more developer expertise in-house:

• Legacy systems presently in .NET, C#, VB6, C++, and SQL Server databases.

• Various data reporting services utilizing Ruby on Rails and PHP/SQL/Elasticsearch technologies.

• Servers hosted and maintained off-site and in the cloud (Azure and AWS) by third-party service providers.

• An outsourced managed services provider handles help desk, endpoint protection, cloud server management, and all other staff computing and network capabilities.