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

• 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.
• 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.
• DevSecOps and CI/CD: Ensure secure development and automated testing and deployment pipelines across relevant tech stacks.
• AI-Assisted Development: Enable the team to use AI tools effectively for solution design, coding, testing, debugging, documentation, and troubleshooting.
• AI Guardrails and Governance: Define and enforce human-in-the-loop controls for AI-generated outputs.
• Compliance and Review: Apply working knowledge of compliance, security, and contractual requirements.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with customers, product owners, architects, security, infrastructure, and other stakeholders.
• Continuous Improvement and Modernization: Use delivery, quality, and cycle-time metrics to evaluate both traditional and AI-assisted approaches.

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.
• Talent Development: Support hiring, onboarding, retention, and succession planning.

Required Technical and Management Qualifications

• A Bachelor's Degree with 5+ years of documented management or leadership experience.
• 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.
• 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.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD, DevSecOps, cloud-native architectures, APIs, containers, automated testing, and secure development practices.
• Ability to articulate architecture, trade-offs, status, risks, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Required Certification

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.

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.
• AWS Certified AI Practitioner.

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.

The likely salary range for this position is $147,050 - $198,950.