Software Development Manager

Description

Summary:

This position is responsible for leading and evolving the organization’s application development capabilities. This role focuses on people leadership, technical direction, and application lifecycle excellence. This position builds and sustains high-performing development teams, establishes strong engineering practices, ensures application quality and stability, and partners with delivery, product, and architecture leaders to support successful outcomes. This position is accountable for how applications are built, maintained, and improved, while delivery ownership remains with Scrum Masters and the PMO.

Functions:

• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical leadership for application design, development, maintenance, and overall application health. Establish and enforce engineering best practices, coding standards, testing practices, and documentation.
• Identify and champion opportunities to adopt AI tools and build intelligence layers into development workflows that improve team productivity and application quality.
• Ensure applications meet standards for maintainability, performance, security, scalability, and long-term sustainability.
• Identify and address skill gaps through coaching, training, and staffing recommendations. Foster professional development and growth of team members by mentoring, identifying training opportunities and coaching individuals through difficult problems. 
• Collaborate with Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Architects to support Agile development and architectural alignment.
• Provide technical input into backlog refinement, estimation, feasibility, and roadmap planning.
• Remove technical impediments, proactively identify technical risks and support teams throughout the development lifecycle. Ensure operational stability across development, testing, deployment, support, and modernization efforts.
• Contribute engineering insights to IT and organizational strategy and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Lead by example as a servant leader, demonstrating technical integrity, collaboration, humility, and professionalism.
• Provide hands-on technical support when appropriate and perform other duties as assigned.
• Foster professional development and growth of team members by mentoring, identifying training opportunities and coaching individuals through difficult problems
• Maintain an understanding of organizational goals, priorities, and business context to lead sound technical decisions 
• Establish performance goals and development objectives for team members. 
• Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and engineering practices through continuing education and professional development.
• Perform other duties as assigned by supervisor.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in software development, computer science, or a related field required.
• Minimum of eight to ten years of total experience in software development with three to five years of leadership or people management experience required.
• Demonstrated experience leading and managing software development teams required.
• Strong technical foundation in modern application development practices required.
• Experience coaching engineers and supporting their professional growth required.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders required.
• Strong collaboration and interpersonal skills preferred.
• Proficiency with standard office productivity tools and ability to learn internal systems preferred.
• Ability to work flexible hours, travel to all organization offices (including in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and South Dakota) and travel to vendor work sites required.
• Ability to work in an office environment with moderate noise level, remain in a stationary position and operate a computer a majority of the time required.
• Ability to move throughout the office to access work materials and to move work materials weighing up to ten pounds daily required.
• Ability to perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation required.