Director, Product Software Engineering

The Architecture & Incubation leader brings extensive experience designing and developing modern software solutions. As an Architecture leader you need to understand how software works, but it is more important you understand customer needs, provide solutions to those problems, and influence the business outcomes the solutions produce. This role bridges the worlds of customer requirements, product management, and software development, helping to ensure the solution produces the desired business outcome while adhering to the state-of-the-art technical architecture, patterns, and practices. The leader has a deep passion for advocating for the customer experience, keeping products current, and designing with strong knowledge of modern architectural patterns and practices.

The leader will partner with other delivery leaders, collaborate closely with COE’s, Product Management, and the CTO to guide overall direction of the products. Guiding discussions and influencing outcomes are keys to success in this role.

RESPONSIBILITIES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Strategic Leadership: Provide strategic leadership and direction for the product software engineering department, aligning it with overall business objectives in the context of a matrixed organization. Define and drive the product architecture evolution by identifying opportunities and driving the right choices.
• Tactical Guidance: Provide tactical guidance to other architects, development leads, and teams as needed to maintain the integrity of the product architecture and protect the customer experience.

• Effective Communication: Communicate effectively in a matrixed organization with senior management, peers, and subordinates to ensure alignment and collaboration that drives consensus and outcomes.
• Objective Development: Develop and define departmental objectives, strategies, and goals to help drive the success of software projects.
• Interpersonal Relationship Management: Establish and maintain positive interpersonal relationships within the department and with other stakeholders.
• Knowledge Utilization and Expertise: Stay updated with relevant knowledge, technologies, patterns, and best practices to drive innovation within the department and across the organization.
• Decision Making and Problem Solving: Make critical decisions and solve complex problems related to software product design, development, delivery, deployment, and team management.
• Team Development and Building: Develop and build high-performing teams of architects, fostering their growth, productivity, and efficacy.
• Work Planning and Prioritization: Organize, plan, and prioritize the department's work to ensure efficient use of resources and on-time delivery of outcomes.
• Coaching and Mentorship: Provide coaching and mentorship to team members, fostering their professional growth and development. Assist the teams in the product life cycle, with particular focus on maintaining alignment with the overall software architecture, providing the overall guidance of the department, and collecting insights for emerging architectures, patterns, and practices.

• Guidance and Direction: Provide guidance and direction to subordinates, ensuring they align with the department's vision. Investigate and propose next generation technologies to solve current and future technical challenges across the organization.

• Standards Compliance Evaluation: Evaluate information and software products to ensure compliance with industry standards.
• Security and Compliance: Provide guidance and recommendations on how to product development teams should comply with global information security policies in a way that common across products and minimizes accumulation of technical debt.
• Technical Debt: Manage the backlog of technical debt across the product portfolio. Work with Product Management to secure the needed capacity to keep technical debt load at acceptable levels defined by Wolters Kluwer’s technical debt remediation framework.

REQUIREMENTS AND QUALIFICATIONS

Job Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related engineering field, and relevant experience working within product software engineering.
• Minimum of 15+ years of experience as an architect in designing software products in the SaaS space, utilizing varied technology choices that are relevant to the problem it is addressing.
• Minimum of 10+ years working within product software engineering leading architects and teams at a leadership level
• Proven experience in designing Distributed Systems with emphasis on scalability, reliability, security, other non-functional requirements, and micro-services architectures.

Skills:

• Architectural patterns: The ability to understand, analyze, and apply predefined design solutions to structural problems in architecture and software product development. This skill involves applying proven patterns to resolve complex design challenges and create efficient and scalable structures, maintaining balance between functional and non-functional requirements.
• Application Security: The ability to protect applications from threats and attacks by identifying, fixing, and preventing security vulnerabilities. This skill involves the use of software methods and systems to protect applications against security threats. Extensive experience with threat modeling is required.
• APIs: The ability to design, develop, and manage Application Programming Interfaces, which constitute the set of protocols and tools used for building application software with API security practices and API testing techniques.
• Frameworks: The ability to understand, utilize, and create structured environments for software development. This skill also involves being able to leverage and select existing frameworks to streamline processes, ensuring better efficiency and code manageability in software development projects.
• Analysis: The ability to examine complex situations or problems, break them down into smaller parts, and understand how these parts work together while maintaining the integrity of the situation or problem.
• Product Software Engineering: The ability to design, develop, test, and deploy software products using modern DevSecOps and GitOps practices and patterns. It involves understanding user needs, defining functional specifications, designing system architecture, coding, debugging, ensuring product quality, and guaranteeing deployment. It also requires knowledge of various programming languages, tools and methodologies, and ability to work within diverse teams and manage projects.
• Azure Cloud Experience: The ability to utilize and manage applications, data, and services in Azure. This skill involves understanding all Azure cloud services and managing resources using automation.
• Problem Solving: The ability to understand a complex situation or issue and devise a solution by defining the problem, identifying potential strategies, and ultimately choosing and implementing the most effective course of action.
• People management: The ability to lead, grow, motivate, engage, and communicate effectively with a team. This includes skills in delegation, conflict resolution, negotiation, and understanding team dynamics. It also involves building a strong team culture and managing individual performance.
• Automation: The ability to design solutions that can adapt well to automated systems or processes. This skill includes understanding both the technical elements and the business implications of automated systems.
• DevSecOps: An ability to use systems and processes to coordinate between development and operations teams to improve and speed up software development processes with security built in by design. This includes automation, continuous delivery, agility, threat modeling, technical debt management, and rapid response to feedback.
• Implementation and Delivery: This is a skill that pertains to the ability to translate designs into action. It involves executing strategies effectively, overseeing the delivery of projects or services, and ensuring they are completed in a timely and efficient manner. It also necessitates the coordination of various tasks and management of resources to achieve the desired business outcomes.
• Agile: The ability to respond to changes swiftly and effectively, with an emphasis on continuous improvement and flexibility
• Financial Budget management: The ability to plan, coordinate, control, and execute financial resources over a certain period, and make decisions on distribution of resources efficiently and effectively. This includes estimating revenues, costs, and expenses, and ensuring they align with the set goals or targets.

Competencies:

• Accountability: Takes ownership for team performance and the outcomes they produce; models and enforces professionally appropriate and ethical behavior in interactions with colleagues and customers.
• Courage to take smart risks: In decision-making, balances potential risk with impact; encourages team to pilot unconventional ideas and facilitates learning from thoughtful risk-taking.
• Inclusive Collaboration: Models inclusion and collaboration by involving team members in decision-making, respecting all colleagues, and reaching across organizational boundaries to partner on objectives.
• Inspiration & Alignment: Motivates team achievement by building engagement through alignment of individual, team and organizational goals.
• Judgement & Decision Making: Leverages personal expertise, input from team, cross-unit stakeholders, and customers to make informed decisions that result in positive team, business, and customer outcomes.
• Business Acumen: Demonstrates deep understanding of business unit operations and effectively engages in cross functional partnerships.