This is a regular full-time exempt position reporting to the Vice President of Product Development.
Position Summary
The Director of Engineering / Senior Principal Software Engineer will provide strong technical leadership for the platform team in the product development division at Scientific Learning. The platform team ensures that our software can be deployed standalone, on-premise, or on-demand for a number of different markets.
The ideal candidate is both a strong software architect with expert hands-on skills as well as a Scrum Master who is passionate about delivering business value by shepherding the platform team during sprints. The ideal candidate is not afraid to roll up his/her sleeves, and always seeks to determine what's possible within the constraints of the business and technology. This position has high visibility and impact within the product development organization, and is fully authorized to deliver releases on time and within budget. The ideal candidate should be an excellent communicator and collaborator across the organization. There will be a number of direct reports to this position, which is a hybrid management/technologist position.
Detailed Responsibilities
- Lead the cross-functional platform development scrum team and serve as Scrum Master for the team. Accountable for leading adoption of a transparent development process that is flexible and embraces change.
- Collaborates with the Product Owner to ensure that the software meets the company's business objectives and technical standards.
- Must have the ability to manage teams across multiple geographies, technology stacks, and release vehicles.
- Communicates extremely well and collaborates easily across the organization; up, across, below in the organizational hierarchy.
- Ensures best practices and architectural rigor during the software design process, providing input and time estimates for alternative strategies and solutions.
- Ensures that the team produces detailed designs and software prototypes relevant to assigned programming tasks.
- Writes well-documented, extensible software code that is easy to maintain, and that adheres to generally accepted programming standards and OOP practices.
- Responsible for evaluating and recommending software and hardware architecture solutions within the scope of assigned projects.
- Regularly holds stand up meetings and tracks project status, deadlines, and evaluates project and technical risks.
- Sets and achieves personal goals for growth and acquisition of new technical skills, keeping pace with new developments in technology.
- Provides regular status reports on progress to VP Product Development, and provides notification of any changes / impediments that impact project schedules.
- Accountable for ultimate quality and performance of all programming work.
- Interacts with QA to conscientiously identify and fix software bugs in a timely manner.
- Produces and maintains technical designs and documentation relevant to assigned programming tasks.
Requirements
- 12-15+ years experience in product development in the software industry
- Extensive hands-on software development experience with Java, J2EE. C++, C#, and PHP experience a plus.
- Experience as a Scrum Master for agile, lean, and test driven development. You should be a strong supporter of continuous integration, test automation, and efficiency in the development organization.
- Execution focus on getting things done; the ideal candidate is thorough, trustworthy, hard-working, and disciplined, and has an interest in process efficiency.
- Expertise with server-side issues such as caching, clustering, distributed computing, persistence, security, SSO, state management, high scalability, and failover.
- Strong experience writing scalable, server-side software for a production SaaS business highly desirable; experience should include multi-tenancy design & implementation.
- Strong experience with open source Java frameworks such as Spring, Struts, Hibernate, Maven, Cocoon, Xerces, Acegi, JSecurity, CXF, Xfire, and Xalan.
- Experience writing cloud, SaaS, or PaaS applications using Amazon EC2 or S3, SimpleDB, or Google App Engine.
- Experience leveraging continuous integration (CI) frameworks such as Hudson, Cruise Control, or Bamboo.
- Strong understanding of web services (REST, SOAP, JSON) and middleware (ESB, integration server) technologies.
- Strong knowledge of OO design patterns and web protocols, frameworks, and technologies.
- Adobe Flash, and Adobe Flex application development experience a plus. BlazeDS expertise, Action Script, and/or Adobe AIR apps experience a big plus.
- BS Computer Science / MS Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
Additional Desired Skills
- Previous experience with Java-based web publishing frameworks such as Struts and Cocoon.
- Developing web applications for deployment in Tomcat or JBoss containers.
- Source control management (SCM) experience using Perforce or svn.
- C++ development experience with Visual Studio .NET and/or XCode for Windows and Mac OS X.
- Experience leading Scrums using Version One a plus.
Please send your cover letter and resume, Attention: Human Resources Department, to resumes@scilearn.com or fax 510.874.1877.
Please no phone calls!
We are located near the 12th Street Downtown Oakland BART station. See map and directions.