Associate Director, Development

How will this role impact First Command?

The Associate Director, Development role provides leadership and accountability across the entire development organization by empowering their employees to be self-sufficient and ensuring collaboration within and across our agile teams. This role primarily acts as a servant leader but is required to be hands-on to deal with issues, technical or cultural, as needed by the situation. They are champions and evangelists of the established best practices and processes defined by the development SDLC and hold developers accountable as necessary. Additionally, this role requires strong communication skills and collaborates with our business partners to ensure work provided to the agile teams are clearly defined and achievable. This role indirectly supports client engagement and experience by ensuring quality solutions are being delivered by the development organization and by providing support to the business

What will the employee do in this role?

• Collaborate with business partners and members of Product Management to ensure feature work is clearly defined with proper acceptance criteria
• Engage and build strong relationships with external vendor partners that enables agile teams to provide business value easier and faster
• Works alongside the Scum Masters and Product Owners to execute and grow First Command’s agile practices
• Provides guidance and guardrails to members of agile teams for executing and upholding the SDLC processes
• Creates an environment of collaboration and inclusion
• Serves as a Subject Matter Expert about business and technical processes for developers and agile teams
• Works with Software Architects and Software Consultants in creating development roadmap, defining and updating development standards and communicating the impacts
• Works alongside Enterprise Architecture and Product Management at the Program level of our agile process to provide technical clarity and sizing of planned work
• Assists Product Management in evaluating, prioritizing and sizing production support issues
• Drives and leads root cause analysis efforts and define remediation steps
• Provide proof-of-concept solutions that show feasibility and viability of potential ideas (as necessary)
• Serve as administrator of systems and platforms (as necessary)
• Ensures communication and coordination across the business is occurring for production releases, maintenance windows and during production-down scenarios
• Oversee and maintain health of the SDLC process, Code Reviews, documentation and development practices
• Ability to fill role of Product Owner or Scrum Master for an agile team

What roles will this employee lead?

• Responsible for standard HR activities which include approving PTO, coordinating and approving training requests, goal setting and all aspects of performance management
• Key contributor in resume reviewing and interview process for hiring of new development employees
• Continually grow the soft and technical skills of developers
• Monitors and measures success of the agile teams by utilizing an agreed upon set of metrics and ensures availability to Senior Leadership
• Continually evaluating, refined and updating metrics that are used that measure quality, success and velocity of our agile teams

What skills/qualifications do you need?

Education

• Preferred – Bachelor’s Degree in a Business-related or Information Systems related area of study
• Strongly Preferred – Product Owner Certified
• Strongly Preferred – Scrum Master Certified

Work Experience

• 6-8 years of experience in the area of responsibility
• OR 5-7 years of experience in organizational leadership

Certifications

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Required – Clear and strong communication skills. Ability to transition between technical and business speak
• Required – Ability to work alongside others in a team environment
• Required – Ability to collaborate with others and foster a safe and open environment
• Required – Troubleshooting and debugging experience and knowledge
• Required – Agile/Scrum/SAFe experience
• Preferred – ITIL experience

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