Director of Software Engineering

Company Description

A best-in-class city that attracts best-in-class talent, Philadelphia is an incredible place to build a career. From our thriving arts scene and rich history to our culture of passion and grit, there are countless reasons to love living and working here. With a workforce of over 30,000 people, and more than 1,000 different job categories, the City of Philadelphia offers boundless opportunities to make an impact. 
As an employer, the City of Philadelphia values inclusion, integrity, innovation, empowerment, and hard work above all else. We offer a vibrant work environment, comprehensive health care and benefits, and the experience you need to grow and excel. If you’re interested in working with a passionate team of people who care about the future of Philadelphia, start here.

What We Offer:
•    Impact - The work you do here matters to millions. 
•    Growth - Philadelphia is growing, why not grow with it? 
•    Diversity & Inclusion - Find a career in a place where everyone belongs.
•    Benefits - We care about your well-being.
 

The Office of Innovation & Technology (OIT) is the central IT agency for the City of Philadelphia headed by the Chief Information Officer (CIO). OIT oversees all major information and communications technology initiatives for the City of Philadelphia - increasing the effectiveness of the information technology infrastructure, where the services provided are advanced, optimized, and responsive to the needs of the City of Philadelphia’s businesses, residents, and visitors. OIT responsibilities include: identifying the most effective approach for implementing new information technology directions throughout city government; improving the value of the city’s technology assets and the return on the city’s technology investments; ensuring data security continuity; planning for continuing operations in the event of disruption of information technology or communications services; and supporting accountable, efficient and effective government across every city department, board, commission and agency.

Job Description

As the central technology office in the 6th largest city in the nation, our portfolio includes critical applications that enable residents to pay taxes and fees online, look up a loved one in jail or prison, find after-school activities in their neighborhood, Philadelphia’s digital front door, phila.gov ,and our home-grown resident single sign on service, login.phila.gov. The majority of new applications and websites have been built on modern technology stacks and hosted in the cloud, but many older applications are running on legacy frameworks and on-premises servers. In this role, you will have oversight over the technical aspects of these major projects, including migration of legacy systems. 

You will oversee a team that:
•    Uses agile principles to ensure our software delivers value more rapidly to its users.
•    Employs devops tools and processes to improve software quality and enable us to increase the frequency of releases.
•    Creates a deep bench of expertise to better support applications and systems that are important to the daily operations of city government.
•    Collaborates closely with a cross-functional team of user experience strategists, content strategists, and designers in the Digital Services team to develop software that considers the people the technology supports through user-centered design principals. 

You’ll join a city government that has the largest GitHub organization among cities (github.com/CityOfPhiladelphia), works in the open, and leverages open-source tools and cloud infrastructure to improve the experience of interacting with City government online.

Essential Functions
As the Director of Software Engineering, you’ll continue this effort, expanding the team through new hires, existing staff and contractors. You’ll continue to grow a culture around agile principles and help introduce processes and tools to support working according to them. Your team will continue to modernize and support the City’s digital portfolio and make it easier for residents to interact with city government online.

As a director, you will:
•    Organize the team and help inform the growth of the engineering practice at the City.
•    Be accountable for project delivery.
•    Expand the effort to modernize our digital portfolio and reduce our maintenance burden through automation.
•    Interface with department clients, understanding their needs, and advocating for technical strategy.
•    Ensure processes, people, and cross-training are in place to troubleshoot outages, including off-hours when necessary and using modern monitoring tools.
•    Oversee changes to legacy applications when necessary.
•    Work with other leaders (data, design, etc.) to priorit