Vice President of Development

Job Title: VP of Development Effectiveness

Location: Westlake, OH / Onsite

Salary: $175k - $220k annually (The pay range may be negotiable based on experience, education, geographic location, and other factors)

Duration: Direct Hire

Job Description:

Duties and responsibilities

• Delivery Leadership: Lead the execution of strategic technology initiatives and development projects by aligning priorities, coordinating teams, and maintaining focus on measurable delivery outcomes.
• Drive timely, in-scope project delivery while ensuring outcomes meet established quality standards and business expectations.
• Maintain executive visibility into team commitments, delivery milestones, risks, dependencies, and decision points.
• Proactively remove delivery roadblocks and elevate critical issues that could affect timelines, scope, or quality.
• Establish clear ownership and accountability for project outcomes across development teams and supporting stakeholders.
• Align software development priorities with enterprise strategy to ensure technology investments support business objectives and deliver measurable return on investment.
• Development Process Improvement: Define and continuously refine software development methodologies that improve execution consistency, delivery quality, and team effectiveness.
• Standardize development practices across teams to promote repeatable execution, shared expectations, and scalable delivery discipline.
• Strengthen planning, estimation, sprint execution, and release management processes to improve predictability and reduce delivery variability.
• Accelerate adoption of Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, automation, and modern engineering practices to reduce bottlenecks, improve release speed, and strengthen delivery scalability.
• Use data-driven metrics to evaluate development efficiency, identify improvement opportunities, and guide continuous process optimization.
• Establish AI-enabled development practices with appropriate governance, controls, and measurement frameworks to assess cost, effectiveness, and business value.
• Engineering Quality: Establish and enforce engineering standards for coding practices, peer reviews, automated testing, and release readiness.
• Improve software quality, reliability, scalability, and maintainability through disciplined engineering practices and continuous feedback loops.
• Reduce technical debt through structured assessment, prioritization, remediation planning, and sustained execution discipline.
• Promote secure development practices and compliance alignment by embedding security, privacy, and regulatory requirements into the development lifecycle.
• Serve as the relationship owner for offshore development partners including the build out of the appropriate monitoring and improvement programs to improve our leveraging of these relationships.
• Team Leadership: Develop and mentor development managers, technical leads, and engineering teams to strengthen leadership capability and execution effectiveness.
• Foster a high-accountability culture grounded in ownership, continuous learning, collaboration, and measurable improvement.
• Align team priorities, goals, and capacity with organizational objectives to ensure development resources are focused on the highest-value outcomes.
• Support staffing strategy, performance management, talent development, and succession planning to build resilient and scalable engineering teams.
• Strengthen collaboration across development, infrastructure, security, product, and business stakeholders to improve alignment, execution speed, and shared accountability.
• Advance talent development and engineering culture by strengthening technical upskilling, team management practices, collaboration, and sustained high-performance expectations.
• Performance Measurement: Define, monitor, and communicate key engineering performance indicators that provide visibility into execution health, delivery effectiveness, and continuous improvement progress.
• Delivery predictability and commitment reliability
• Sprint velocity, throughput, and capacity utilization
• Defect trends, escape rates, and quality performance
• Production stability, incident frequency, and recovery performance
• Deployment frequency, release cadence, and automation maturity
• Lead time for changes and end-to-end delivery cycle time
• Technical debt reduction and modernization progress
• Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as cycle time, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and defect rates to measure and improve team output.
• Provide regular executive reporting on delivery progress, engineering performance, risk trends, and measurable improvement outcomes.
• Success Measures: Higher project delivery success rates with improved predictability, scope control, and stakeholder confidence.
• Improved software quality with fewer production incidents, reduced defect escape rates, and stronger release readiness.
• Faster, more predictable development cycles supported by disciplined planning, execution, and release management practices.
• Greater team productivity, engagement, and accountability through clearer priorities, stronger leadership, and measurable execution discipline.
• Consistent adoption of modern engineering practices, development standards, and process improvements across teams.
• Reduced technical debt, operational inefficiencies, and delivery friction through structured modernization and continuous improvement efforts.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field.

Experience

• 10+ years of progressive IT leadership experience in software development, engineering, or technology operations.
• 5+ years leading engineering organizations or software delivery teams.
• Demonstrated success improving software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes across multiple teams.
• Experience leading enterprise-scale Agile transformation initiatives.
• Experience working with executive leadership to align technology delivery with business objectives.
• Experience managing cross-functional teams without necessarily having direct authority over all participants.

Technical Knowledge

• Deep understanding of modern software engineering practices, including:
• Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Lean principles
• DevOps and CI/CD pipelines
• Software architecture and design principles
• Test automation and quality engineering
• Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
• Source control and branching strategies
• Release management
• Familiarity with engineering metrics and dashboards.
• Experience applying to AI tools to SDLC or functional business areas.
• Proven ability to influence organizational change.
• Strong executive communication and presentation skills.
• Ability to build consensus across development, QA, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders.
• Strong conflict resolution and facilitation skills.
• Process Improvement Expertise
• Metrics and Analytics Expertise

Equal Opportunity Employer/Veterans/Disabled

Benefits offerings include but are not limited to:

• 401(k) with match
• Medical insurance