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Director, Software Engineering

Western Governors University, UT
Job Level
Senior position
Post Date
04/18/2019
Job Category
Director
Sector
  • Systems / Operations
Job Status
Areas of Responsibility
  • Software
Link to Job Posting

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The Director, Software Development will provide technical leadership, vision, direction, and mentoring for the software engineering team.  This individual will manage multiple teams which design, develop, and support applications to meet business requirements. The Director, Software Development will deliver product and feature roadmaps and provide overall leadership and day to day management for a team of software development professionals.  Additionally they will provide resource planning and project scheduling using Agile/Scrum software development methodologies.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Meets business needs by managing the activities of developers consistently delivering quality solutions on-time, within budget, and scope.

  • Work with internal customers to gather business processes and project requirements.

  • Actively drives the development life-cycle from requirements analysis, feasibility estimates, design, code, documentation, testing, implementation, and support.

  • Developing project plans, resource planning, scheduling and managing development timelines.

  • Building and managing multi-disciplined software teams and overseeing the development processes using industry best practices.

  • Responsible for design reviews, code reviews, and mentoring the software development team.

  • Support change management process to manage software releases, application patching and changes to production configurations.

  • Manage multiple tasks and responsibilities in high-pressure environments; excelling at pinpointing and resolving problems in early project stages to avoid cost/time expenses.

  • Oversight and management of department expenses and budget planning.

Required Skills:

  • Strong people and management skills to interact with staff, colleagues, cross-functional teams and third parties.

  • Ability to drive a culture of quality and personal accountability through development and delivery teams.

  • They must have a commitment to quality through the ability to translate complex technical requirements into functional software using best practices.   

  • Expertise in vendor contract management and management of distributed development teams and resources.

  • Expert in Agile methods including SCRUM and TDD.

  • Experience in application architecture and making rational buy vs. build and interface decisions.

  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to work equally well in self-managed and team-based Agile/Scrum projects.

  • Deep technical knowledge of web applications using web services (REST/SOAP/SOA/XML/HTML).  

Required Experience: 

  • 10 + years of Enterprise level Application development with experience both as a hands on programmer and software development manager.

  • 5+ years of experience managing multiple teams with interactions across multiple, geographically dispersed sites.

  • 5+ years of managing contract vendors including contract definition and review, vendor score-carding, RFI/RFP processes and ongoing vendor relationship management.

  • Bachelor of Science Degree (Masters preferred) in Computer Science, Information Technology or related field.

Other technical experience that would be a plus:

JSF, J2EE, Java EE, jQuery, JavaScript. 
SQL, Oracle or other database interface experience. 
NetBeans, Subversion, Jira. 
IDM / OSSO. 
Student Information Systems. 
CRM systems. 
Document Management systems. 
Application Integration with legacy systems

As an equal opportunity employer, WGU recognizes that our strength lies in our people. We are committed to diversity.