Learning And Development Manager Jobs in Waterloo, IA

About the role: 

In this role, you will lead and professionally develop a team of software engineers, cultivate the processes and standards they work by, and support the delivery of the features and platform work that power ClearanceJobs.com for both candidates and employers. The product is built on Laravel and modern PHP with a TypeScript and VueJS front end and MySQL, running on AWS with Linux, Docker, and automated CI/CD pipelines. You will balance hands-on technical involvement-code review, architecture and design decisions, release quality-with the people work of coaching, growing, and setting direction for your team. 

 Your career at DHI will be filled with exciting challenges and opportunities for growth. From onboarding and familiarizing yourself with our development environment to contributing to ongoing projects and building strong relationships with your team, every day will bring new learning experiences and chances to make a difference. 

 Why we're hiring for this role: 

The ClearanceJobs Engineering team builds and maintains the platform that connects security-cleared professionals with the employers who need them. As the product roadmap grows, we need a manager who can keep the team focused, healthy, and delivering-raising the quality bar on releases while developing engineers in their careers.  

 In the short term you will: 

In the first 90 days in the role, you will accomplish several key milestones: 

•  Onboarding and Familiarization: Understand the company's development environment, tools, processes, and coding standards. Get to know your team members and their roles.
•  Understanding the Product: Familiarize yourself with the product or projects you'll be working on. Understand the user base, key features, and the overall goal of the application. 
•  Codebase Familiarization: Dive into the existing codebase. Understand the architecture, design patterns, and coding conventions used in the project. 
•  Contribution to Ongoing Projects: Pick up smaller tasks or bug fixes to get acquainted with the codebase and workflow, and start participating in code review and sprint planning with the team. 
•  Team and Process Assessment: Hold one-on-ones with each engineer to understand their goals, strengths, and blockers. Assess the team's current delivery process and identify early opportunities to improve it. 

 In the long term you will: 

• Learning and Skill Development: Identify areas for improvement in your development and leadership skills and start learning. This could involve learning new skills, frameworks, or tools that are relevant to your teams and projects. 
•  Setting Goals: Set short-term and long-term goals for your role and the team. Discuss these goals with your leadership to ensure alignment with the team's objectives. 
•  Building Relationships: Build relationships with your team members, stakeholders, and other departments you'll be collaborating with. Communication is key to a successful team dynamic. 
•  Feedback and Improvement: Seek feedback from your peers and manager regularly. Use this feedback to improve your skills and performance. 
•  Contribution to Process and Product Improvement: As you become more familiar with the projects and processes, look for opportunities to suggest improvements in development processes or tools that could benefit the team and raise the bar for the product. 
•  Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Document your work and share your knowledge with the team. This could include writing documentation, presenting to stakeholders, or conducting code reviews. 

  What you bring to the team: 

• Research latest trends, strategies and emerging technologies for modern web solutions and contribute to the technical vision. 

• Leadership, collaboration, and a strong ability to create positive relationships across departments. 

• Experience with coding, testing, debugging, documenting, and implementation of complex software applications. Able to create complex prototypes and ensure deliverables are high quality and meet user expectations. Support system and integration testing activities. Initiate architecture and design reviews for new product features and adhere to software development standards. 

• Work with product owners and designers to understand and implement requirements in high-quality product features. 

• Oversee and contribute to the documentation of production support processes. Anticipate long term support issues and plans for corrective actions. Collaborate with support teams to ensure complex issues are resolved in a timely manner. 

 Required: 

Technical skills: 

• Hands-on proficiency building and maintaining web applications with Laravel and modern PHP, TypeScript and VueJS, and MySQL-comfortable reviewing pull requests and writing code alongside the team. 

• Working knowledge of AWS and cloud-hosted application infrastructure, including deployment pipelines, monitoring, and cost consciousness. 

• Ability to guide architecture and design decisions for new product features, weigh technical trade-offs, and hold the team to shared coding, testing, and documentation standards. 

• Experience with unit and end-to-end testing tools, and using automated test coverage to ensure quality product releases. 

• Ownership of production reliability: triaging incidents, driving root-cause analysis, and converting findings into preventative work. 

• Experience with secure development practices appropriate to a platform serving security-cleared professionals and government contractors. 

• Fluency with version control, CI/CD, and development management tooling to keep delivery predictable and visible. 

Leadership and team management: 

• Experience leading a software engineering team, including hiring, onboarding, coaching, and career development through regular one-on-ones and growth plans. 

• Comfort giving and receiving direct, timely feedback, and managing performance constructively. 

• Ability to plan and sequence work across competing priorities-scoping, capacity planning, and setting clear commitments with stakeholders. 

• Clear written and verbal communication, including translating technical detail for Product, Sales, and executive audiences. 

• A partnership mindset with Product, Design, and QA-shared ownership of outcomes rather than handoffs. 

• Judgment about when to step in technically and when to delegate, building the team's autonomy and technical depth over time. 

 Preferred: 

• Experience working with Jira software management tools. 

• Experience with Linux, and containerized workloads using Docker. 

• Ability to leverage AI tools effectively across the modern SDLC - using coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Kiro, etc.) for implementation, code review, testing, and debugging, with sound judgment about when AI accelerates the work and when it doesn't. 

NOTE: This job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of the duties and responsibilities of the job described, nor are they intended to be such a listing of the skills and abilities required to do the job. Rather, they are intended only to describe the general nature of the job as of the date this job description was prepared. Management reserves the right to modify this job in order to meet business needs. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.