Director, Software Engineering & Development

Ascensus is hiring a Software Engineering Manager to lead the team building and operating its Enterprise AI Platform. The role combines people development and hands-on technical leadership to improve software delivery, testing, DevOps, support, and operational practices.

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

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