The Leading Provider of Wealth Marketing Solutions

Based in New York City, our client provides strategic and interactive marketing solutions for wealth management firms and luxury brands. The company offers strategy planning and research services; online marketing and advertising programs; and e-marketing tools, which comprise a suite of software offering an e-marketing platform that allows communication with clients and prospects. It also provides marketing services, including print and online content publishing, brand and identity creative, creative strategy and planning, logo and mark creation, graphic design and layout, editorial design, copywriting, multimedia design, video and audio production, prepress and print, and collateral development services. In addition, the company offers interactive solutions, such as Web design, Web building and analytics, Internet and intranet/micro site development, information architecture, SEM/SEO, systematic design, content management, E-commerce, and Internet application development services,  and multichannel integrated marketing, rich and emerging media, media strategy, media planning and buying, and strategy and creative development services.

The company has become the pre-eminent provider of interactive agency expertise, accompanied by specific CRM oriented software tools to help their marquis clients, including Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and Barclays.

The Position

Reporting to the CEO, the SVP Technology's role is to oversee day to day activities of the software product development and enterprise architecture integration teams for the company's Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. The SVP will directly supervise a team of software developers, quality assurance, and business analysts; identify risk and opportunity areas; and coordinate all software development activities.

The head of technology will also work closely with Product Strategy on the business side 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 has full management responsibility and oversight for a cross-functional group of engineering personnel.

The SVP Technology shall:

• Manage software architecture, design, development, procurement, and integration. Also manage tier-2 and higher support once software has been placed into operations.
• 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 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.
• Manage short- and long-term staff planning, recruitment, performance management, work assignments, training, mentoring, career development, and recognition or disciplinary action.
• Be responsible for business planning and proposals, operating budgets and financial terms / conditions of contracts for both internal and external customers.

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

Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years overall software development experience, with no less than 5 years in a SaaS environment as well as at least 5 years of management experience.
• 2-3 years of senior-level or leadership experience in a software environment with 10 or more direct reports.
• Experience working with product managers and other business stakeholders to set timeliness, budget resources, and manage expectations and quality of the development process
• Advanced understanding of SaaS 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 high volume/transaction web applications
• Strong skills in Java software development.
• Experience with refactoring and eliminating legacy dependencies
• Demonstrated substantial leadership in both technical and management areas
• Experience leading development efforts using a variety of different SDLC approaches (waterfall, agile, etc.)
• Knowledge of multi-threaded programming
• 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 of 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
• 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 timeliness 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, preferably MY SQL Serve
• Knowledge of latest web technologies with understanding of AJAX and RIA
• Ability to translate technology choices into business implications

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

Compensation

Compensation is competitive with the position’s requirements.  In a performance-based environment, this will include base salary, incentive bonus structure based on both individual, department, and corporate qualitative and quantitative MBOs, and a potential stakeholder position in the company.