Measuring & Delivering Energy Savings

Our client  is a leading energy software company founded in 2007. Based in Boston, MA and privately held, The Company has developed patent-pending technology that enables them to retrieve utility data on behalf of virtually any household in America. Utilizing that technology, the company is the richest residential energy efficiency platform available today, and serves both customers and a variety of institutions that care about energy efficiency with its platform and the technology that underlies it. Its platform helps people to understand their energy use and be incentivized to save, as well as enables individuals to interact with and track their electric, gas, and water usage online.

The Position

The CTO/VP Engineering’s role is to oversee day to day activities of the software product development team for all of Company offerings. The role will build out and directly supervise a team of architects, software developers, quality assurance, and business analysts; identify risk and opportunity areas; and coordinate all software development activities.

This role will also work closely with Product Strategy and manage the Lead Technical Architect to envision and define features in the product roadmap and be accountable for the features development, deployment and support.  In addition to the technical leadership of the team, this role will have full management responsibility and oversight for a cross-functional group of engineering and quality assurance personnel.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the VP Engineering shall:

• Be chief in charge of translating business goals and objectives into technical framework
• Manage software architecture, design, development, procurement, and integration. Also manage tier-2 and higher support with business-to-business partners including utilities, etc...
• Manage short- and long-term staff planning, recruitment, performance management, work assignments, training, mentoring, career development, and recognition or disciplinary action.
• Achieve cost, schedule, technical and quality performance for delivered software. Compile, maintain, schedule, resource, execute prioritized lists of development projects, including planning and managing the budget and scheduling personnel and vendor contracts to meet project needs. Collect metrics on development performance and report on them.
• Collaborate with other functional managers (customer facing business units, systems engineering, QA, and operations) to ensure architectural integrity, effective integration and test, and ongoing system stability.
• Direct any technical subcontractor management including contract negotiation, technical support, budgetary management and program management of various contracts and associated budgets.   Coordinate vendor contracts, deliveries and schedule with affected company parties.  Contract with vendors for services to support engineering while addressing Intellectual Property, Non-Disclosures and Statements of Work.

The successful candidate must also have the ability and experience to lead a multi-disciplined organization in a multi-location environment.

Qualifications

• Senior-level or leadership experience in a web-based software development environment with 10 or more direct reports.
• Experience working with product managers and other business stakeholders to set timelines, budget resources, and manage expectations and quality of the development process
• Advanced understanding of web application programming architectures, including standards for security, scalability and configurability
• Expertise and experience in implementing and overseeing measures for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery
• Deep understanding of load balancing and performance optimization  principals for cloud-based high volume/transaction web applications
• Experience leading development efforts using a variety of different SDLC approaches (RAD, Agile, Scrum, etc.)
• Experience developing service-oriented architectures for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer customer sets.
• Outstanding collaboration skills, excellent communication skills, an ability to look at the big picture

Essential Job Functions/Responsibilities

• Lead software and front-end engineers in the specification, design and development and support of all our applications, including websites/products, our core services and our internal and external tools
• Provide hands-on technical management leadership and support to software development team soon to grow to 12 - 15 engineers
• Identify skill and performance gaps in current organization and provide improvement plans
• Improve existing processes and establish new processes for efficient development and high quality output
• Evaluate and enhance overall development environment, release practices and Quality Assurance methodology
• Instate and maintain development standards, code reviews, unit testing and integration testing frameworks
• Maintain overall ownership / accountability for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery
• Work in tandem with Technical architect and development team to identify and implement new measures for system performance optimization under high load using cloud backbone
• Lead, recruit, develop and supervise the development team members
• Evaluate and take accountability for decisions on key technologies adopted
• Ensure proper development of technical specifications and documentation.
• Estimate resource usage and timelines for development team
• Review team members' detailed design of components/modules/code
• Provide a good balance of experience and skills in several front-end and/or back-end technologies
• Strong relational database skills
• Knowledge of latest web technologies with particular understanding of browser behavior when automating data scraping, open source development platforms like Ruby on Rails, etc.
• Ability to translate technology choices into business implications

Ideal Candidate Profile

The diagram below illustrates the intersection of competencies critical in the position: