Director - Engineering Enablement

Chicago, IL, United States

You have a clear vision of where your career can go. And we have the leadership to help you get there. At CNA, we strive to create a culture in which people know they matter and are part of something important, ensuring the abilities of all employees are used to their fullest potential.

CNA seeks to offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package to our employees that helps them - and their family members - achieve their physical, financial, emotional and social wellbeing goals.

For a detailed look at CNA's benefits, check out our Candidate Guide.

As the Director of Engineering Enablement, you will hold the reins of technical authority for innovative products within our Engineering and Quality Enablement portfolio. Leading a team of talented engineers, you will collaborate closely with CNA's dynamic Software Engineering community to develop and enhance the cutting-edge Developer Platforms. These platforms are the backbone that empowers our developers to build, ship, and run software faster, with higher quality, and greater security.

In this pivotal role, you will be a visionary technical product owner with a strong customer-focused mindset and product management expertise. You will bring your hands-on expertise in software engineering to the forefront, acting as a coach and mentor in best practices such as CI/CD, BDD, and TDD. As a champion of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) architectural design and development, you will inspire and guide our teams to achieve excellence, driving innovation and efficiency across the organization. Join us and lead the charge in shaping the future of software engineering at CNA!

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

Performs a combination of duties in accordance with departmental guidelines:

Product Leadership for Developer Platforms:

Define and execute product vision and strategy for one or more products as part of the Developer Platforms to maximize developer productivity and ensure a delightful developer experience.

Listen to the voice of the customers in software engineering community, Infrastructure, InfoSec and other stakeholders to understand their pain points and needs in order to define and prioritize product features.

Influence the program increment roadmap and backlog across portfolios, and establish and refine the Architectural Runway and Vision by collaborating with other portfolios' stakeholders. Actively engage in Agile Release Train events, collaborating and coaching stakeholders to maintain alignment with the architectural vision.

Technical Leadership:

Lead the design and implementation of the components and services within the overall Developer Platforms ecosystem. Provide expert-level software engineering knowledge and hands-on problem-solving expertise.

Owns measurable velocity, specifically around overcoming hurdles, implementing new designs, and implementing best practices.

Establish and enforce engineering practices and quality control standards for platform components and services.

People Leadership:

Develop, lead, and mentor a high-performing team of software engineers.

Has full management responsibility for the performance and development of subordinate staff, including resource planning, hiring, talent, performance, and career development.

Foster a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement among internal and MSP engineers.

Innovation and Continuous Improvement:

Stay updated on industry trends and technologies, evaluating and developing AI-assisted tools to enhance productivity throughout the SDLC lifecycle.

Encourage and facilitate innovation within and across the teams.

Promote and implement the scaled agility mindset, values, principles, and practices across teams.

May perform additional duties as assigned.

Reporting Relationship

Typically AVP or above

Skills, Knowledge & Abilities

Expert knowledge of Software Engineering practices, technologies, and tools, including developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, testing automation.

Extensive experience with public cloud platforms (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure acceptable), Kubernetes and Service Mesh.

Working experience with Observability platforms, API Management and Application Integration platforms.

Solid understanding of coding principles and practices, experience managing code quality through pull requests and other processes.

Extensive experience at highest technical level of all phases of system architecture design using state of the art architecture, object oriented component analysis and development and proficiency in web-based systems architecture, service-based architecture and enterprise application architecture.

Strong knowledge of contemporary technology and business trends that allows architecture to solve problems in a creative and cost effective manner.

Expert understanding of SAFe/Agile, architecture, SDLC, and testing practices with experience incrementally building and shepherding the scaled agility mindset, values, principles, and practices across teams and ARTs.

Excellent written, verbal and presentation skills. Able to communicate, collaborate and consult effectively with vendors, clients, peers, and IT management and staff.

Strong analytical, problem solving and negotiations/conflict resolution skills. Able to balance technical excellence with business results.

Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to coach, influence, guide and mentor teams, peers, clients and leadership in cross functional teams.

Extensive experience developing strategic system architecture plans and/or architectural runways and decomposing architectural initiatives into program Epics.

Extensive experience with information processing fundamentals, understanding of current and emerging best practices.

Proven experience identifying, analyzing and resolving system problems.

Education & Experience

Bachelor's Degree or Master's Degree (preferred) in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related discipline; or equivalent work experience.

Typically, a minimum of 10 years work experience in technical delivery, including experience with systems architecture methodologies, concepts and frameworks like TOGAF.

Typically, a minimum of 10 years work experience with design and implementation in some or all of the following technology platforms (Java, Node, Python, .NET), cloud platforms (GCP or AWS or Azure) and CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, etc.).

Hands-on experience with Observability platforms (Elastic, DataDog, Dynatrace, etc.), API management and integration platforms (Apigee, Boomi, Workato, etc.) and Low-code platforms (Mendix, Outsystem, Appian, etc.) is a big plus.

Experience in insurance or financial services industry preferred.

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CNA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities in the recruitment process. To request an accommodation, please contact [email protected].

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