Senior Software Engineering Manager

Ascend Learning is a national leader in data driven, online educational solutions for learners, educators and employers in high-growth, licensure-driven professions spanning healthcare, fitness and wellness, skilled trades, insurance and financial services. We are passionate about accelerating learning while impacting job readiness, employment success and employee retention with the belief that our work changes lives.

Our culture is intentionally results-driven and selfless with a relentless focus on our customers. We believe in trust, transparency, freedom and responsibility with a commitment to meritocracy, inclusion and diversity of thought. Continual investment in our over 1400 employees is also a core principle realized through ongoing professional development and providing opportunities to grow, develop and lead. Ascend Learning is headquartered in Burlington, MA with additional office locations and remote workers in cities across the U.S. and in the U.K.

Ascend Learning Technology & Operations is hiring now for a Senior Software Engineering Manager. The position will have responsibility for overseeing the developing, testing, implementation, and maintenance of software applications in a for-profit organization utilizing multiple technologies. The development team is responsible for maintenance and development of multiple services/ SaaS applications that serve a number of our brands that are part of Ascend Learning. Leawood, KS office location/hybrid preferred. Burlington, MA office/hybrid, Minneapolis, MN office/hybrid, Gilbert, AZ office/hybrid additional options.

A Senior Software Engineering Manager in the Ascend Learning Technology organization will be expected to function and lead in a DevOps culture. The manager facilitates communication between developers and with other leaders, removes impediments, and provides leadership, mentorship, and career development to employees. This individual will partner with other leaders in the organization to coordinate and prioritize backlog for a product, as well as ensure that the scrum process is used properly by their team members. The manager will directly manage software engineers, analysts, and a scrum master including offshore contractors.

Responsibilities

• Help to meet business needs outside of agile sprints or assign them to capable resources on your team
• Model the culture we want to have: a DevOps mindset, caring interactions, and accountability
• Ensure their employees are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible with their teams.
• Works with the development teams to ensure they are able to deliver committed work items.
• Handle day-to-day management responsibilities for direct reports.
• Assist/lead teams' program increment and iteration planning, retrospectives, and demos.
• Work with Release Train Engineer and Scrum Masters to lead release deployments across cross functional teams.
• Establish and maintain effective working relationships with business and technical staff in on-site and virtual environments.

Written Communications: Able to write clearly and succinctly in a variety of communication settings and styles; can get messages across that have the desired effect.

Planning: Able to participate in iteration planning discussions, provide estimations on tasks for stories, and help identify dependencies.

Functional Design: Capable of leveraging a deep functional knowledge of the solution/platform to clearly articulate via stories in JIRA what the desired end state of a feature is to software engineers. Also needs to be able to communicate testing requirements for quality assurance testing purposes for a given feature. The Software Development Manager needs to understand the core principles of agile software development and be able to function in an environment where they can develop an understanding of both features in development, but also features encapsulated in the backlog.

Software Quality: Understand the foundations of good software development. Lead the software engineers to provide adequate unit testing on all new development and show a commitment to ensure that any code promoted from the engineers IDE to an integration environment has been thoroughly unit tested. The Ascend Learning Software Engineering manager leads the team in producing supportable software, meaning that new code can be monitored, that monitoring is accounted for in development, and that the code can be easily deployed through an automated methodology as part of our DevOps culture.

Customer Focus: Dedicated to meeting the expectation and requirements of internal business units and external customers. This includes working to ensure that assigned stories are completed within the respective iteration.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in computer-related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Certified Scrum Master / Iteration Lead or equivalent work experience.
• 10 years technical experience
• 5 years of people management experience.
• Experience with process management and process change implementation.

Skills & Abilities

• Solid knowledge of multiple languages and development methodologies, including c#, Angular or AngularJS, .NET Core, JQuery, MVC, WCF, SQL, HTML5, and CSS 3.0
• Solid grasp of infrastructural and operational principles
• Strong team player
• Problem-solving skills.
• Excellent analytical skills and attention to detail.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to interact professionally with a diverse group, executives, managers, and subject matter experts.
• Able to communicate technical information to non-technical users.
• Must be able to facilitate discussion and facilitate alternatives or different approaches.
• Must be able to lead a team to self-organization.
• Able to lead across and up as well as down the formal organization

Candidates should be aware that Ascend Learning currently maintains a policy requiring all employees to be fully vaccinated. Newly hired employees must be fully vaccinated by their start date. Ascend Learning is an equal opportunity employer and will provide a reasonable accommodation to those unable to be vaccinated where it is not an undue hardship to the Company to do so as provided under federal, state, and local law. Exceptions to the vaccine requirement may apply for employees living or working in Montana.

Ascend Learning, LLC is proud to be an equal opportunity employer(M/F/Vets/Disabled). No agency or search firm submissions will be accepted. Applications for U.S. based positions with Ascend Learning, LLC must be legally authorized to work in the United States and verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

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