Application Development Team Manager

The Application Development Team Manager leads a distributed software development organization spanning legacy, modern, and cloud‑native systems. This role is accountable for high‑quality delivery, modernization, and secure engineering practices while fostering a collaborative, high‑trust team culture. The manager oversees project planning, agile execution, DevSecOps, and CI/CD pipelines, and guides developers in effective AI‑assisted delivery using tools such as Kiro, Claude Code, and OpenAI‑based solutions. They ensure governance and guardrails for AI, maintain compliance, and partner with cross‑functional stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and efficient applications.

Key Responsibilities

The manager provides end‑to‑end leadership for software development teams working across Java/Spring, React, Python, SQL, AWS, and Kubernetes. Responsibilities include:

• Development Team Leadership: Direct and support a geographically distributed team working on legacy, modernized, and cloud‑native applications, ensuring clear priorities, coordination across workstreams, and consistent engineering practices.
• Delivery Management: Own project planning, scheduling, resourcing, and risk management to ensure successful delivery against scope, schedule, and budget. Oversee contract obligations and ensure commitments are met.
• Agile/Scrum Execution: Run agile ceremonies; manage product and team backlogs; lead sprint planning, review, and retrospectives; and oversee release planning and tracking using Jira, Confluence, and related tools.
• Engineering Standards: Define, implement, and enforce standards for coding, architecture, testing, documentation, and code reviews. Promote best practices that improve maintainability, reliability, and performance.
• DevSecOps and CI/CD: Ensure secure development and automated testing and deployment pipelines across relevant tech stacks. Drive the adoption of DevSecOps practices, infrastructure‑as‑code, automated quality checks, and continuous delivery into AWS and Kubernetes environments.
• AI‑Assisted Development: Enable the team to use AI tools effectively for solution design, coding, testing, debugging, documentation, and troubleshooting. Promote agentic workflows and AI teaming to increase velocity and quality.
• AI Guardrails and Governance: Define and enforce human‑in‑the‑loop controls for AI‑generated outputs. Protect security, privacy, and sensitive data, and ensure traceability and accountability for AI‑assisted work.
• Compliance and Review: Apply working knowledge of compliance, security, and contractual requirements. Implement structured code, peer, and release reviews so all changes are validated before production.
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Partner with customers, product owners, architects, security, infrastructure, and other stakeholders. Communicate decisions, progress, risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Continuous Improvement and Modernization: Use delivery, quality, and cycle‑time metrics to evaluate both traditional and AI‑assisted approaches. Drive modernization of legacy systems, cloud migration, and process improvements that increase efficiency, resiliency, and scalability.

People Management

The manager is also accountable for building and developing a strong, engaged team:

• Mentoring and Coaching: Provide technical and professional coaching to developers and other team members, supporting ongoing learning, AI upskilling, and career growth.
• Workload Prioritization: Set clear goals and expectations, ensure work is aligned to priorities, and balance capacity across individuals and squads to avoid bottlenecks and burnout.
• Performance Management: Deliver timely, constructive feedback; conduct performance reviews; recognize strong performance; and address performance concerns with clarity and fairness.
• Team Culture and Engagement: Create an inclusive, respectful, and high‑trust culture across remote and geographically dispersed team members. Foster collaboration, transparency, and psychological safety.
• Talent Development: Support hiring, onboarding, retention, and succession planning. Build a resilient team with the right mix of skills for legacy maintenance, modernization, and cloud‑native development.

Required Technical and Management Qualifications

• A Bachelor's Degree with 5 + years of documented management or leadership experience (e.g., product management, project management, software development management, or team leadership).
• At least 5 years of experience across the full software development lifecycle, including agile delivery.
• Proven experience leading senior developers and/or multidisciplinary application teams, including remote or distributed teams.
• Demonstrated strength in organizational skills, prioritization, communication, stakeholder management, and problem solving, with the ability to manage multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Hands‑on experience with modern application technologies such as Java, Spring, Hibernate, SQL, React, Python, AWS cloud services, Kubernetes, and associated integration patterns.
• Experience using AI‑assisted development tools across the lifecycle (design, implementation, testing, code review, documentation, troubleshooting).
• Working knowledge of CI/CD, DevSecOps, cloud‑native architectures, APIs, containers, automated testing, and secure development practices.
• Ability to articulate architecture, tradeoffs, status, risks, and recommendations to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

Required Certification

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (required).

Preferred Certifications

• Project Management Professional (PMP) and/or Certified ScrumMaster (CSM).
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional.
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).
• Certified SAFe Agilist or SAFe Practice Consultant, particularly for scaled agile environments.
• AWS Certified AI Practitioner, as a foundation for AI/ML and generative AI services on AWS.

Additional Desired Skills

• Familiarity with refugee and immigrant populations and related social programs.
• Knowledge of federal procurement and acquisition processes.
• Experience working as a consultant or contractor within the federal government.
• Background in technology modernization, legacy transformation, cloud migration, or organizational change initiatives.

Other Requirements

• U.S. citizenship.
• Ability to successfully complete a Public Trust background investigation.
• Remote work location.