Director, Software Engineering & Development

Ascensus is a technology and service platform powering savings plans across America. The Director, Software Engineering & Development will lead and develop a cross-functional engineering team responsible for delivering, operating, and improving an enterprise AI platform while maintaining strong standards for quality, security, reliability, and maintainability. The role combines people leadership, technical judgment, delivery execution, and occasional hands-on engineering contribution.

Responsibilities:

• Growing and developing engineering talent
• Creating a high-performance team culture
• Supporting delivery of enterprise AI platform capabilities
• Improving engineering practices across software development, testing, DevOps, support, and operations
• Partnering with product, architecture, AI, business, and technology leaders
• Helping the team move quickly while maintaining quality, security, reliability, and maintainability
• Occasionally contributing hands-on to implementation, debugging, automation, technical spikes, or code reviews when the situation calls for it
• Build a team that delivers high-quality software consistently
• Develop engineers, SDETs, DevOps engineers, and support engineers into stronger technical contributors
• Create a culture of ownership, accountability, speed, and quality
• Stay technically close enough to guide decisions, unblock the team, and occasionally contribute hands-on without becoming a bottleneck or displacing team ownership
• Help the team use AI-assisted development tools without lowering engineering standards
• Improve how the team builds, tests, deploys, monitors, and supports software
• Partner effectively with product owners, architects, data scientists, business stakeholders, and senior leaders
• Create clarity when priorities are ambiguous or changing
• Raise the quality of engineering practices across the team
• Identify performance gaps early and address them directly and constructively
• Hire strong talent and help retain high-performing associates
• Help the team connect day-to-day execution to broader Enterprise AI Platform goals
• Grow your own leadership scope, judgment, and organizational influence over time

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering or related technical experience
• 2+ years of technical leadership, team leadership, people leadership, or engineering management experience
• Experience leading, coaching, or mentoring software engineers or related technical team members
• Ability and willingness to stay technically engaged with the team's codebase, architecture, development workflow, and operational tooling, including occasional hands-on contribution when needed
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, including:
  • Clean code
  • Source control
  • Unit testing
  • CI/CD
  • Design patterns
  • Refactoring
  • Maintainability
  • Production support
• Experience working with software delivery teams that include roles such as:
  • Software Engineers
  • SDETs
  • DevOps Engineers
  • Support Engineers
  • Quality Engineers
• Experience supporting production software systems, including troubleshooting, incident response, root-cause analysis, or operational improvement
• Strong understanding of Agile delivery practices and modern engineering team workflows
• Ability to develop associates through coaching, feedback, goal setting, performance conversations, and career development planning
• Ability to create a high-performance team environment built on ownership, accountability, trust, and continuous improvement
• Strong communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong problem-solving, prioritization, and decision-making skills
• Ability to partner with product, architecture, operations, support, and business teams to drive successful outcomes
• Experience participating in hiring, interviewing, candidate evaluation, or team growth activities
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Business Information Systems, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Managing or leading teams that build enterprise platforms, internal developer platforms, AI platforms, or shared services
• Experience with AI-enabled applications, LLM-powered systems, RAG, chatbots, agent workflows, or AI-assisted engineering practices
• Familiarity with Azure, Azure AI Foundry, Azure DevOps, or related Microsoft cloud and engineering tools
• Experience with engineering teams using AI-powered development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or similar platforms
• Experience leading teams that use automated testing, SDET practices, Playwright, Python-based test automation, or end-to-end testing
• Experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, release automation, infrastructure automation, or cloud operations
• Experience with observability tools such as New Relic, Langfuse, OpenTelemetry, Azure Log Analytics, or similar platforms
• Experience managing geographically distributed teams
• Experience improving production support models, incident management, operational readiness, or service reliability
• Experience working with enterprise systems such as Salesforce, internal platforms, APIs, workflow systems, or service-oriented architectures
• Experience leading teams through ambiguity, rapid change, or emerging technology adoption
• Experience building succession plans, development plans, hiring strategies, or team capability roadmaps
• Interest in continuing to grow leadership responsibility