IT Director: Lead Full-Stack Platform & Teams

Markel Service; Richmond (VA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Markel Service is seeking an IT Director to lead multiple full-stack development teams behind the Wholesale and Specialty policy administration platform. The role focuses on design, delivery, and operational excellence on the Microsoft technology stack, with emphasis on coaching and aligning teams with business priorities and compliance requirements.

The ideal candidate will oversee performance, recruit and retain talent, and drive modern engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated

Qualifications

• 8 to 10 years of software development, infrastructure, or project delivery experience, including full stack application development.
• Hands-on experience with the Microsoft technology stack, including C#/.NET, ASP.NET, REST APIs, and SQL Server.
• Experience delivering and operating applications in Microsoft Azure (App Services, Functions, Azure SQL).
• Experience with modern CI/CD practices and tooling, preferably Azure DevOps and/or GitHub, including automated build, test, and release pipelines.
• Experience with modern front-end development (Angular, React, or Blazor).
• Experience with agile software development methodologies.
• Experience managing multiple teams strongly preferred.
• Providing coaching and mentoring to team members.
• Capable of balancing immediate operational needs while making progress towards long-term engineering goals.
• Experience leading teams that support a large, long-lived business-critical application; insurance/financial services experience a plus.

Responsibilities

• Contributes to strategic, operational, and divisional goals as a member of the management team.
• Tracks team delivery, provides project update/information, and informs management of deviations impacting delivery.
• Plans and conducts performance appraisals for employees and administers disciplinary action.
• Initiates discussions around raises, bonuses, and promotions within team.
• Involved with recruitment, development, retention, and organization of all managed staff, including offshore resources.
• Defines team operating standards and ensures essential procedures are followed at all times.
• Trains, coaches, and mentors employees on the team.
• Identifies and measures team health indicators.
• Ensures focus on priorities, milestones, and deliverables; tracks and reports key metrics to senior management.
• Represents the engineering team to stakeholders, customers, and other delivery teams.
• Leads design, build, and delivery of full-stack components on the Microsoft stack (UI, APIs, services, data).
• Owns engineering practices for CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, code quality, environment and release management, and production support.
• Partners with product owners to translate business needs into working software and aligns the team with insurance domain processes.
• Ensures reliable integration with surrounding systems such as billing, claims, document generation, and reporting.
• Manages one or more teams as assigned, balancing workload and priorities.
• Participates in production support escalation; occasionally works late evenings and weekends as needed.

Skills

C#/.NET

REST APIs

SQL Server

Azure

Angular/React/Blazor

CI/CD

Agile

Team leadership

Mentoring

AI tooling in development

Tools

Azure DevOps

GitHub

Job description

Markel Service is seeking an IT Director to lead multiple full-stack development teams behind the Wholesale and Specialty policy administration platform. The role focuses on design, delivery, and operational excellence on the Microsoft technology stack, with emphasis on coaching and aligning teams with business priorities and compliance requirements.

The ideal candidate will oversee performance, recruit and retain talent, and drive modern engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated