Director, Software Engineering & Development
About the role
Ascensus is the leading independent technology and service platform powering savings plans across America, providing products and expertise that help nearly 16 million people save for a better today and tomorrow. As a Software Engineering Manager, Enterprise AI Platform, you will lead a team responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving production-grade AI-enabled software. This role manages a cross-functional engineering team that may include: Software Engineers, SDETs, DevOps Engineers, Support Engineers. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for someone who has strong software engineering experience, cares deeply about people development, and can help teams deliver practical AI-powered solutions with speed, quality, and discipline. While this is a management role, the person in this position is expected to stay close to the codebase and technical workflow. When the situation calls for it, they may contribute directly to implementation, debugging, automation, technical spikes, or code reviews to help the team move faster, remove blockers, or solve critical problems.
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