Vice President, Development Effectiveness

Description

"Lead the continuous improvement of software development execution by driving accountability, enhancing engineering practices, improving delivery predictability, and ensuring technology initiatives are completed efficiently, consistently, and with high quality."

The VP of Development Effectiveness is responsible for ensuring technology initiatives are executed effectively, development teams operate efficiently, and software engineering practices continuously improve. This role drives accountability for delivery, removes organizational obstacles, establishes best practices, and creates a culture of continuous improvement across development teams. They bridge the gap between business strategy and engineering execution, ensuring that development lifecycles are efficient, modern, and aligned with overall corporate goals.

Duties and responsibilities

Delivery Leadership

• Lead the execution of strategic technology initiatives and development projects by aligning priorities, coordinating teams, and maintaining focus on measurable delivery outcomes.
• Drive timely, in-scope project delivery while ensuring outcomes meet established quality standards and business expectations.
• Maintain executive visibility into team commitments, delivery milestones, risks, dependencies, and decision points.
• Proactively remove delivery roadblocks and escalate critical issues that could affect timelines, scope, or quality.
• Establish clear ownership and accountability for project outcomes across development teams and supporting stakeholders.
• Align software development priorities with enterprise strategy to ensure technology investments support business objectives and deliver measurable return on investment.

Development Process Improvement

• Define and continuously refine software development methodologies that improve execution consistency, delivery quality, and team effectiveness.
• Standardize development practices across teams to promote repeatable execution, shared expectations, and scalable delivery discipline.
• Strengthen planning, estimation, sprint execution, and release management processes to improve predictability and reduce delivery variability.
• Accelerate adoption of Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, automation, and modern engineering practices to reduce bottlenecks, improve release speed, and strengthen delivery scalability.
• Use data-driven metrics to evaluate development efficiency, identify improvement opportunities, and guide continuous process optimization.
• Establish AI-enabled development practices with appropriate governance, controls, and measurement frameworks to assess cost, effectiveness, and business value.

Engineering Quality

• Establish and enforce engineering standards for coding practices, peer reviews, automated testing, and release readiness.
• Improve software quality, reliability, scalability, and maintainability through disciplined engineering practices and continuous feedback loops.
• Reduce technical debt through structured assessment, prioritization, remediation planning, and sustained execution discipline.
• Promote secure development practices and compliance alignment by embedding security, privacy, and regulatory requirements into the development lifecycle.
• Serve as the relationship owner for offshore development partners including the build out of the appropriate monitoring and improvement programs to improve our leveraging of these relationships.

Team Leadership

• Develop and mentor development managers, technical leads, and engineering teams to strengthen leadership capability and execution effectiveness.
• Foster a high-accountability culture grounded in ownership, continuous learning, collaboration, and measurable improvement.
• Align team priorities, goals, and capacity with organizational objectives to ensure development resources are focused on the highest-value outcomes.
• Support staffing strategy, performance management, talent development, and succession planning to build resilient and scalable engineering teams.
• Strengthen collaboration across development, infrastructure, security, product, and business stakeholders to improve alignment, execution speed, and shared accountability.
• Advance talent development and engineering culture by strengthening technical upskilling, team management practices, collaboration, and sustained high-performance expectations.

Performance Measurement

• Define, monitor, and communicate key engineering performance indicators that provide visibility into execution health, delivery effectiveness, and continuous improvement progress.
• Delivery predictability and commitment reliability
• Sprint velocity, throughput, and capacity utilization
• Defect trends, escape rates, and quality performance
• Production stability, incident frequency, and recovery performance
• Deployment frequency, release cadence, and automation maturity
• Lead time for changes and end-to-end delivery cycle time
• Technical debt reduction and modernization progress
• Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as cycle time, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and defect rates to measure and improve team output.
• Provide regular executive reporting on delivery progress, engineering performance, risk trends, and measurable improvement outcomes.

Success Measures

• Higher project delivery success rates with improved predictability, scope control, and stakeholder confidence.
• Improved software quality with fewer production incidents, reduced defect escape rates, and stronger release readiness.
• Faster, more predictable development cycles supported by disciplined planning, execution, and release management practices.
• Greater team productivity, engagement, and accountability through clearer priorities, stronger leadership, and measurable execution discipline.
• Consistent adoption of modern engineering practices, development standards, and process improvements across teams.
• Reduced technical debt, operational inefficiencies, and delivery friction through structured modernization and continuous improvement efforts.

Requirements

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field. 

Experience

• 10+ years of progressive IT leadership experience in software development, engineering, or technology operations. 
• 5+ years leading engineering organizations or software delivery teams. 
• Demonstrated success improving software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes across multiple teams. 
• Experience leading enterprise-scale Agile transformation initiatives.  
• Experience working with executive leadership to align technology delivery with business objectives. 
• Experience managing cross-functional teams without necessarily having direct authority over all participants. 

Technical Knowledge

• Deep understanding of modern software engineering practices, including: 
• Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean principles 
• DevOps and CI/CD pipelines 
• Software architecture and design principles 
• Test automation and quality engineering 
• Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) 
• Source control and branching strategies 
• Release management 
• Familiarity with engineering metrics and dashboards. 
• Experience applying to AI tools to SDLC or functional business areas.

Leadership Competencies

• Proven ability to influence organizational change. 
• Strong executive communication and presentation skills. 
• Ability to build consensus across development, QA, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders. 
• Strong conflict resolution and facilitation skills. 
• Process Improvement Expertise
• Metrics and Analytics Expertise

Characteristics of a Successful Candidate

• Data-driven decision maker. 
• Passionate about continuous improvement. 
• Champions engineering excellence over bureaucracy. 
• Balances speed with quality. 
• Builds strong partnerships across the organization. 
• Comfortable challenging existing processes with thoughtful, evidence-based recommendations. 
• Focuses on enabling teams rather than creating additional oversight. 
• Demonstrates ownership, accountability, and a bias toward execution. 

Working conditions

This job operates in a professional office environment. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers, filing cabinets and fax machines.

The job description outlined above reflects general details as necessary to describe the primary functions of this job, the level of knowledge and skill typically required, but should not be construed as an all-inclusive listing of work requirements. Individuals may be asked to perform duties other than those mentioned above in order to cover absences or relief in the appropriate department to equalize peak work periods or otherwise balance the workload.

Physical requirements

While performing the duties of this job, employees are regularly required to sit, walk and stand; talk or hear, both in person and by telephone; use hands repetitively to operate standard office equipment.

About ECHO Health, Inc.

ECHO is a leading innovator of healthcare payment solutions, connecting payers, healthcare providers and members in the most cost-effective and efficient manner. 

Payers, employers, providers and members benefit from the association with ECHO, realizing dramatic reductions in the costs of fulfillment and customer service. This is achieved through a unique, flexible and efficient process combining consolidation of provider payments and member communications with electronic settlement. ECHO's services comply with ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), CORE (Committee on Operating Rules for Information Exchange) and Taft-Hartley regulations.

Today, ECHO's unique consolidation and electronic settlement services reduce costs for healthcare payers throughout the United States, processing more than 600 million in payment transactions and over $140 billion in payments annually.

ECHO is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.