Head of Application Development & Maintenance (Mars Veterinary Health)

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Summary and Qualifications:

As part of the Mars Petcare family of businesses, Mars Veterinary Health is a global network of veterinary practices made possible by 75,000 Associates who care for millions of pets across nearly 3,000 clinics in more than 20 countries each year. We are committed to leveraging our reach to make a long-term positive impact on people, pets, and the planet and know our Purpose – A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS – starts with the people who care for them. We strive to offer unparalleled veterinary care for pets by first and foremost enabling and empowering our Associates to do what they love, whether in primary, specialty, and emergency care or management and leadership.

Role Purpose

We are seeking a dynamic, execution-focused Head of Application Development & Maintenance to lead the delivery, and management of enterprise and customer-facing applications across all Mars Veterinary Health (MVH) brands. Reporting directly to the CIO and working as a key member of the technology leadership team, this role will be instrumental in shaping and driving the application landscape that powers veterinary practices, clinical workflows, pet owner experiences, and internal operations across our global network.

As a leader, you will oversee a global team of application developers, product owners, engineering leads, and delivery managers to ensure the reliability, scalability, and continuous evolution of MVH’s application ecosystem.

Essential Responsibilities and Tasks:

• Strategic Application Leadership: Define and execute the enterprise-wide application strategy, balancing modernization and maintenance across a diverse portfolio spanning clinical, operational, and digital domains.
• Application Portfolio Management: Oversee the lifecycle of all core and supporting applications across MVH brands—including practice management systems (PMS), customer engagement platforms, enterprise applications, and bespoke solutions.
• Team & Vendor Leadership: Lead and grow a global team of software development professionals and manage third-party development partners and SaaS vendors.
• Agile Product Delivery: Champion modern engineering practices and agile delivery methods to accelerate value creation, drive quality, and improve speed to market.
• DevSecOps Enablement: Champion the integration of security into app dev (DevSecOps), ensuring automated security capabilities, and support initiatives to modernize legacy with cloud-native and microservices-based architectures.
• Cross-Brand Collaboration: Ensure cohesive application strategies across Banfield, VCA, BluePearl, Linnaeus, and AniCura—while recognizing and supporting unique brand needs.
• Operational Excellence: Establish performance metrics, incident response models, and DevOps practices to ensure uptime, security, and performance across the application landscape.
• Technology Modernization: Lead efforts to rationalize legacy systems, sunset redundant tools, and adopt cloud-native and API-first platforms.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Partner with business leaders, clinical stakeholders, and IT peers to align application capabilities with strategic goals and evolving customer expectations.
• Live and exemplify the Five Principles of Mars, Inc. within self and team.
• Other job duties as assigned.

Special Working Conditions:

• Hybrid role, working from Hub location 3x a week.
• Ability to work at a computer for long periods of time.
• Project timelines and work volume/deadlines may often require more than 40 hours per week to complete essential duties of this job.
• Must have mental processes for reasoning, remembering, mathematics and language ability (reading, writing, and speaking the English language) to perform the duties proficiently.
• Ability to carry out instructions furnished in written, oral, or diagram form and to solve problems involving several variables.
• Ability to stand, walk, stoop, kneel, crouch, and climb as well as manipulate (lift, carry, move) up to 50 pounds.
• Requires good hand-eye coordination, arm-hand-finger dexterity with the ability to grasp, and visual acuity to use a keyboard and operate necessary equipment.
• The noise level in the work environment is normally moderate.
• Environment where pets are present.

Experience, Education and/or Training:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• Relevant certifications (e.g., PMP, SAFe, Scrum, ITIL) are a plus