Director of Software Development & AI Strategy

Blitt & Gaines Law Offices; Naperville (IL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

PTO

Paid Holidays

Medical Benefits

401k and Profit-Sh Sharing

Job summary

Blitt and Gaines, P.C. is seeking a Director of Software Development to lead the organization’s Software Development, QA and Data Operations functions.

This hands‑on leader will shape technical strategy, modernize platforms, and drive high‑performing engineering teams across multiple domains. The role requires deep software engineering expertise, enterprise architecture experience and a track record of building scalable, secure and maintainable systems in a regulated environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of enterprise software development experience.
• 3+ years leading software engineering teams.
• Experience managing technical managers and cross‑functional engineering organizations.
• Demonstrated experience designing enterprise software architectures.
• Strong understanding of Agile software delivery methodologies.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term software engineering strategy for the organization.
• Lead architecture and technical design decisions for enterprise applications and services.
• Establish engineering standards, coding guidelines, architectural principles and development best practices.
• Balance delivery of business initiatives with reduction of technical debt and platform modernization.
• Drive continuous improvement across engineering processes and software quality.
• Serve as the organization’s senior technical authority for software engineering.
• Lead the design, development, testing, deployment and maintenance of enterprise software systems.
• Review application architecture, database design, API design and implementation approaches.
• Guide modernization initiatives involving legacy applications and platforms.
• Develop scalable service‑oriented and API‑driven architectures.
• Promote reusable software components and engineering consistency.
• Ensure applications are secure, maintainable, scalable and supportable.
• Provide strategic leadership for the organization’s Data Operations function.
• Partner with the Data Operations Manager to ensure reliable reporting, ETL processes, data synchronization and enterprise reporting platforms.
• Oversee Microsoft SQL Server architecture, database performance and data integrity.
• Support enterprise reporting initiatives utilizing Microsoft Power BI.
• Ensure application architecture and database design remain aligned with long‑term business needs.
• Lead Agile software development using Azure DevOps.
• Manage engineering roadmaps, sprint planning, backlog prioritization and release planning.
• Establish engineering metrics around delivery, quality, stability, cycle time and operational performance.
• Improve deployment automation and CI/CD pipelines.
• Implement engineering governance including peer reviews, coding standards, release management and production change control.
• Drive operational excellence through proactive monitoring, logging, observability and incident management.
• Develop and implement an enterprise strategy for AI‑assisted software development.
• Evaluate, deploy and govern agentic AI coding platforms including Claude Code and other enterprise AI development tools.
• Establish engineering standards for responsible AI‑assisted code generation, automated code reviews, documentation generation, testing, refactoring and technical analysis.
• Design secure workflows that integrate AI agents into the software development lifecycle while protecting intellectual property and sensitive business information.
• Lead adoption of AI‑powered engineering practices that improve developer productivity without compromising software quality, maintainability, or security.
• Develop governance policies for AI‑generated code, validation requirements and human review processes.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and recommend adoption strategies that provide measurable business value.
• Mentor engineering teams on effective prompt engineering, AI collaboration techniques and best practices for integrating agentic development into daily workflows.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Agile

Strategic thinking

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

Azure DevOps

Azure

Git

CI/CD

RESTful API

Job description

Blitt and Gaines, P.C. is seeking a Director of Software Development to lead the organization’s Software Development, QA and Data Operations functions.

This hands‑on leader will shape technical strategy, modernize platforms, and drive high‑performing engineering teams across multiple domains. The role requires deep software engineering expertise, enterprise architecture experience and a track record of building scalable, secure and maintainable systems in a regulated environment.