Associate Director, Development

About the role

The Associate Director, Development provides leadership and accountability across the entire development organization by empowering employees to be self‑sufficient and ensuring collaboration within and across agile teams. Acting as a servant leader, the role is hands‑on for technical or cultural issues, champions best‑practice SDLC processes, holds developers accountable, and collaborates with business partners to ensure work is clearly defined and achievable. This indirectly supports client engagement and experience by delivering quality solutions.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with business partners and Product Management to ensure feature work is clearly defined with proper acceptance criteria.
• Engage and build strong relationships with external vendor partners to enable agile teams to deliver business value faster.
• Work alongside Scrum Masters and Product Owners to execute and grow First Command’s agile practices.
• Provide guidance and guardrails to agile team members for executing and upholding SDLC processes.
• Create an environment of collaboration and inclusion.
• Serve as a Subject Matter Expert on business and technical processes for developers and agile teams.
• Partner with Software Architects and Software Consultants to create development roadmaps, define and update development standards, and communicate impacts.
• Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture and Product Management at the program level to provide technical clarity and sizing of planned work.
• Assist Product Management in evaluating, prioritizing, and sizing production support issues.
• Drive and lead root‑cause analysis efforts and define remediation steps.
• Provide proof‑of‑concept solutions to demonstrate feasibility and viability of potential ideas as needed.
• Serve as administrator of systems and platforms when required.
• Ensure communication and coordination across the business for production releases, maintenance windows, and production‑down scenarios.
• Oversee and maintain health of the SDLC process, code reviews, documentation, and development practices.
• Fill the role of Product Owner or Scrum Master for an agile team when needed.

Leadership responsibilities

• Approve PTO, coordinate and approve training requests, set goals, and manage performance for team members.
• Contribute to resume reviewing and interview processes for hiring new development employees.
• Continuously grow the soft and technical skills of developers.
• Monitor and measure agile team success using agreed‑upon metrics and report availability to senior leadership.
• Continuously evaluate, refine, and update metrics that measure quality, success, and velocity of agile teams.

Qualifications

• Preferred: Bachelor’s degree in a Business‑related or Information Systems‑related area of study.
• Strongly Preferred: Product Owner certification.
• Strongly Preferred: Scrum Master certification.
• 6–8 years of experience in the area of responsibility, or 5–7 years of experience in organizational leadership.

Required knowledge, skills, and abilities

• Clear and strong communication skills with the ability to transition between technical and business language.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment.
• Ability to foster a safe and open environment for collaboration.
• Troubleshooting and debugging experience and knowledge.
• Experience with Agile, Scrum, and SAFe methodologies.
• Preferred: ITIL experience.