Director of Software Engineering — Platform & Cloud Leader

New York City Criminal Justice Agency; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 155,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision

Retirement plan

Paid time off

Professional development

Employee Assistance Program

Job summary

New York City Criminal Justice Agency seeks a Director of Software Engineering to provide strategic and technical leadership across NYCJA's enterprise application portfolio. You will guide architecture, deliver scalable, secure software, and lead a growing team of engineers, partnering with stakeholders and external partners on modernization initiatives.

The role emphasizes hands-on technical leadership, cloud-native design, CI/CD and reliability in a hybrid work model.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience owning enterprise application platforms in production, including managing technical debt and long-term platform evolution.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineers through direct technical leadership.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with both technical and business audiences.
• Experience in regulated, public sector, healthcare, financial, or other high-accountability environments is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, delivery, and operation of NYCJA's enterprise application platforms.
• Provide engineering leadership across the full software development lifecycle in partnership with product owners, business stakeholders, and other IT teams.
• Build, develop, and retain a high-performing Software Engineering team through hiring, coaching, performance management, succession planning, and professional development.
• Participate directly in architecture, system design, and key technical decision-making.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards for software design, code quality, testing, CI/CD, security, and development practices.
• Work alongside engineering teams to diagnose and resolve complex production, performance reliability, and integration issues.
• Define and execute the application modernization strategy, including cloud-native architecture, API-first design, and containerized platforms.
• Partner with Infrastructure & Security to ensure applications meet availability, monitoring, deployment, disaster recovery, and operational support requirements for 24/7 business operations.
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs involving performance, security, reliability, maintainability, scalability, and cost.
• Manage software vendors, consultants, and external development partners to ensure quality delivery and effective use of resources.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, including AI-assisted software engineering tools that improve productivity, software quality, security, and operational efficiency.
• Maintain sufficient technical depth across the application portfolio to guide engineering decisions and hold teams and vendors accountable for technical outcomes.
• Contribute to overall IT strategy in partnership with the Data Platform, Infrastructure & Security, and Solution Delivery teams.
• Champion NYCJA's mission, values, and collaborative culture.

Skills

Software development

Engineering leadership

Team management

Technical leadership

Azure

Distributed systems

Docker

Kubernetes

System integration

Mentorship

Communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/SE/IS

Tools

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

New York City Criminal Justice Agency seeks a Director of Software Engineering to provide strategic and technical leadership across NYCJA's enterprise application portfolio. You will guide architecture, deliver scalable, secure software, and lead a growing team of engineers, partnering with stakeholders and external partners on modernization initiatives.

The role emphasizes hands-on technical leadership, cloud-native design, CI/CD and reliability in a hybrid work model.