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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Application Development Manager

💰 $120,000 - $170,000

EngineeringITManagementSoftware Development

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Application Development Manager to lead multiple application development teams responsible for designing, building, and operating enterprise-grade software solutions. This role combines hands-on technical leadership with people and project management, accountability for delivery, and stewardship of application architecture, quality, and lifecycle. The ideal candidate will drive strategic roadmaps, collaborate with product and business stakeholders, and implement best practices for Agile, CI/CD, cloud-native development, observability, and secure software engineering.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer / Technical Lead with 5+ years of development experience and some people leadership exposure
  • Engineering Team Lead or Development Manager responsible for a product or module
  • Solutions Architect or Technical Program Manager transitioning into direct engineering leadership

Advancement To:

  • Senior Director of Engineering / Head of Application Development
  • VP of Engineering or Chief Technology Officer (for smaller orgs)
  • Director of Software Delivery or Platform Engineering

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Management (Director of Product)
  • Solutions/Enterprise Architecture
  • Technical Program Management / Delivery Management

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead, mentor, and grow multiple cross-functional application development teams (frontend, backend, QA, DevOps) by establishing clear performance expectations, conducting regular one-on-ones, career development plans, and hiring top engineering talent to meet roadmap demands.
  • Define and own the application development strategy and roadmap in partnership with product management and architecture, ensuring alignment with business goals, technical feasibility, and cost/benefit trade-offs.
  • Manage end-to-end delivery of complex software projects across the SDLC — from requirements refinement and sprint planning to deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement — ensuring on-time, on-budget releases with expected quality metrics.
  • Drive adoption of modern software engineering practices including Agile/Scrum (or Kanban), test-driven development (TDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to accelerate delivery and reduce production risk.
  • Own application architecture and design decisions for critical systems, collaborating with solution architects to evolve monoliths to microservices, define API strategies, ensure system scalability, fault tolerance, and maintainability.
  • Partner with Security, Compliance, and Risk teams to embed secure coding standards, run threat modeling, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable), and remediate vulnerabilities in a timely manner.
  • Establish and track engineering KPIs (cycle time, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery, defect escape rate) and use metrics to drive data-informed decisions, process changes, and continuous delivery improvements.
  • Oversee the full lifecycle of application operations including environment management (dev/test/prod), release orchestration, incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem remediation to minimize business impact.
  • Collaborate closely with Product Managers and Business Stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical specifications, prioritize feature development, and balance technical debt with new feature delivery.
  • Manage capacity planning, resource allocation, and budgeting for application teams, including forecasting workload, outsourcing/vendor use, and ensuring cost-effective use of cloud and platform resources.
  • Champion cloud migration and cloud-native patterns (AWS/Azure/GCP), guiding teams on containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS/AKS/GKE), serverless patterns, and managed platform services to reduce operational overhead.
  • Ensure high code quality and maintainable codebases by defining code review practices, enforcing style and architecture guidelines, and promoting reusability through shared libraries and internal platforms.
  • Drive automation across testing, build, release, and infrastructure provisioning to reduce manual toil, accelerate delivery cycles, and improve reliability.
  • Lead vendor and third-party relationships for application components (APIs, middleware, SaaS integrations), managing contracts, SLAs, and technical evaluations to ensure vendor solutions meet business and technical needs.
  • Facilitate cross-team coordination for large-scale programs and integrations, resolving dependencies, managing risks and escalations, and aligning multiple engineering teams to shared goals and timelines.
  • Direct the modernization of legacy applications through refactoring, re-platforming, or re-architecting initiatives to improve performance, security, and developer productivity.
  • Implement observability practices (logging, tracing, metrics, dashboards) and SRE principles so teams can proactively detect and resolve issues and maintain agreed service level objectives (SLOs).
  • Lead recruitment and retention initiatives including interviewing, offer evaluation, onboarding, and building an inclusive, high-performance engineering culture that emphasizes ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning.
  • Coordinate and prioritize technical debt remediation and infrastructure upgrades, ensuring that short-term delivery pressures do not compromise long-term system stability and scalability.
  • Oversee test and QA strategy, including automation, performance testing, security testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure production readiness and reduce post-release defects.
  • Deliver executive-level reporting on program status, risks, milestones, and delivery health to senior leadership and stakeholders, including mitigation plans and resource needs.
  • Promote effective documentation and knowledge-sharing practices (runbooks, architecture docs, coding standards) to reduce bus factor and enable efficient onboarding of new team members.
  • Manage change control and release management processes, coordinating scheduled deployments with business calendars and communicating impacts to stakeholders and customers.
  • Serve as a key escalation point during major incidents or outages, coordinating cross-functional response, communicating status updates, and owning the timeline for resolution.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Conduct periodic architecture and codebase health reviews to identify long-term improvements and cost optimizations.
  • Mentor and coach technical leads to improve their leadership, planning, and stakeholder management skills.
  • Represent engineering in cross-functional steering committees and governance boards to ensure alignment of technical initiatives with overall enterprise strategy.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proven experience leading software engineering teams and delivering enterprise applications across the full SDLC; familiarity with Agile methodologies and scaling frameworks (Scrum, SAFe).
  • Strong software architecture knowledge: microservices, SOA, event-driven architectures, APIs (REST, GraphQL), and design patterns for distributed systems.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and cloud-native services including compute, managed databases, message buses, and serverless constructs.
  • Proficiency with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and related CI/CD toolchains (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps).
  • Solid background with backend languages and frameworks such as Java/Spring Boot, .NET/C#, Node.js/Express, Python/Django or equivalent.
  • Experience with frontend frameworks and technologies (React, Angular, Vue) and full-stack delivery expectations.
  • Strong knowledge of database systems (relational: PostgreSQL, MySQL; NoSQL: MongoDB, DynamoDB) and data modeling for high-scale applications.
  • Experience implementing DevOps practices, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM), configuration management, and automated deployments.
  • Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, ELK) and implementing SLOs/SLIs.
  • Solid understanding of security best practices (OWASP), secure SDLC, identity and access management (OAuth, SAML), and encryption/data protection approaches.
  • Experience with automated testing frameworks (unit, integration, contract, performance) and test automation strategy.
  • Practical experience with performance tuning, scalability planning, caching strategies (Redis, CDN), and cost optimization for cloud resources.
  • Vendor and third-party integration experience including API management and SaaS evaluation.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people management: coaching, feedback, conflict resolution, hiring, and retention.
  • Excellent stakeholder management and business partnering: translating business needs into technical solutions and setting realistic expectations.
  • Strategic thinking and prioritization: balancing product features, technical debt, and operational stability.
  • Exceptional communication skills, including executive reporting, technical presentations, and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Problem-solving mindset with ability to lead through ambiguity and high-pressure incidents.
  • Strong organizational skills, time management, and ability to drive multiple concurrent initiatives to completion.
  • Influencing skills to drive change across engineering, product, and operations without direct authority.
  • Customer-focused orientation with a track record of delivering user-centric solutions and measurable business value.
  • Continuous learning mindset and commitment to fostering an inclusive, diverse team culture.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree (MS) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field or relevant executive education/certifications in technology management.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical/Computer Engineering
  • Business Administration (MBA) with technology focus

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 8–15+ years in software development with at least 3–5 years in people management or technical leadership roles.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years of hands-on engineering experience and 5+ years managing multiple teams or a portfolio of products, with proven delivery of complex, large-scale enterprise or consumer-facing applications; demonstrated experience with cloud migrations, CI/CD adoption, and application modernization programs.
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