Director Software Engineering, Full Stack

The Director will provide hands-on leadership in the architecture, design, development, and enhancement of Somos products, with emphasis on full stack, front end website/applications.  As a strong leader of deeply technical engineering staff, the director will delegate work across his team to force multiply the outcomes and impact for Somos while coaching and mentoring his staff to produce their best work. Successful candidate is a “problem solver” and has an appetite for novel, new approaches for solution delivery.  Role requires proven ability to forge inter-vendor relationships, while exceeding customer expectations by proactive identification of problem areas and developing timely solutions in a telecommunication setting.  Will be responsible for driving innovation, technology strategy, and architecture across a technically diverse application portfolio.

This opportunity provides the ability to work in a dynamic, high-performing environment, with high-visibility that will allow your experience to help advance the future of telephone number administration, authentication enablement and identity management solutions!

Core Job Responsibilities & Accountabilities

• Provide hands-on application software development leadership using agile methodologies across the full stack, building scalable distributed applications and APIs for outstanding user experiences
• With experience as an inspirational director, with solid people management abilities, manage team(s) of senior technical architects and leads, across multiple product areas, or multiple technology functions, making sure they are not only producing good work themselves, but also effectively supporting their teams
• Responsible for department’s overall technical competence, guiding and growing that competence in the whole team via training and hiring
• A strong leader who sets the example for cross-functional collaboration between divisions within the CTO organization, across other departments within Somos, working well with other peer directors to help achieve Somos’ goals
• Focus to ensure his/her teams are productive by mentoring and coaching, working on the strategic and tactical tech roadmap that tackles business needs, efficiencies and revenue, and fundamental technology innovation
• With deep collaboration with Operations team, responsible for effective and flawless execution of complex product deliverables, ensuring they are designed efficiently, cost effectively, on time and at optimum quality levels
• Hold regular 1:1s, provide feedback on career growth, progression towards goals, areas for improvement, and praise as warranted
• Accountable for guiding and managing the goal-setting process for all teams in the engineering organization, helping these teams articulate goals that support both business initiatives and technology and organizational quality
• Excellent interpersonal, team management, facilitation, and communications skills; be able to simplify technical concepts to explain them to nontechnical partners and explain business direction to technology team in a way that inspires and guides them
• Responsible for creating high-performance, high velocity agile organizations, measuring and iterating on processes as Somos grows and evolves as a business
• Foster a creative and innovative culture with a strong emphasis on team
• Should have a strong technical background, research new technologies, stay abreast of trends in tech industry, help debug and triage critical systems, should understand systems he/she oversees well enough to perform code reviews and help research problems as needed
• Contribute to architecture and design efforts, primarily by serving as the technically savvy voice asking questions, to ensure code written meets business needs and can scale as the needs grow
• Actively collaborate with platform engineering team to build and integrate common services and components, continually evaluating and refining development/cloud technology standards, patterns, best practices and processes to realize the vision of a common operating model for Somos
• Be a leader for recruiting, headcount management and planning, career growth and training for the engineering organization, and as necessary manage vendor relationships and participate in the budgeting process

Essential Qualifications & Skills

• Deep tenure and experience (10+ years) in large scale application software development with progressive levels of responsibility, 5+ years of recent relevant experience leading architecture and development projects with cross-functional/matrix teams
• Recent, hands-on experience leading and building performant front end website/applications with deep strength in modern frontend concepts and frameworks/libraries (HTML, CSS, React, Typescript, Tailwind, Express) and Javascript ecosystem
• Solid understanding and experience in building the backend and Web APIs using REST for the web applications in any one of languages like Node.js, Java or Python
• Deep experience building large-scale web services, microservices-based, Kubernetes-orchestrated applications or serverless workloads in the cloud environment
• Proven successful prior experience building software using agile methodologies with a keen eye on productivity metrics (e.g., code churn, commit size, test coverage,) and help to continuously improve code velocity, quality, and release frequency
• Practitioner of automation/configuration management, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, A/B testing, feature flags), and logging and monitoring practices for high availability
• Must be able to communicate complex technical details with exceptional analytical, critical thinking, hands-on troubleshooting and technical problem analysis abilities
• Exceptional interpersonal and organizational skills and effective at influencing and driving organizational change

Preferred Skills 

• Experience with SpringBoot, GraphQL, open source message queues
• Experience in cloud database technologies such as Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, DocumentDB
• Understanding of AWS or other cloud provider with hands-on ability in developing, deploying and securing services, ideally in regulated environments
• Prior experience developing a strategy and roadmap for consolidating and modernizing a diverse telecommunication platform
• Specific experience with high throughput, low latency, highly available transaction processing applications preferred
• Proven experience managing vendors and teams in diverse combination of in-house development and outsourced development

This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive list of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of this position.   Aspects of this job description may change at any time, with or without notice.

 This job description is not intended as and does not create an employment contract.  The organization maintains its status as an at-will employer.  Employees can be terminated for any reason not prohibited by law.