Manager - Software Development

Purpose:

The Software Development Manager leads Citadel's software development team as a hands-on, player-coach engineering leader, writing and shipping production code alongside the team while owning how the team plans, delivers, and supports its work. The role is accountable for the application portfolio that runs the business, spanning new development, enhancements and redesigns, integrations and APIs, modernization, and production support. Based in Dallas and serving the entire Citadel operation, the role brings framework and structure to development efforts by establishing delivery and quality standards, providing architectural and AI-assisted development direction, and maintaining clear, proactive communication with IT leadership and business stakeholders. Beyond delivery, the role builds the team itself: mentoring and coaching developers, raising the engineering bar, managing performance, and partnering with HR and IT leadership on hiring, in a culture where trust, respect, and collaboration shape how the team works together and serves its customers.

Essential Job Functions:

Leadership and Delivery Management (Approximately 60%):

• Manage and delegate the day-to-day work of the software development team, including work assignment, prioritization, progress monitoring, and on-time delivery across multiple concurrent projects.
• Establish a clear readiness standard for incoming work, partnering with IT leadership and business sponsors to confirm the business outcome, decision owner, acceptance criteria, and priority before the team commits to delivery.
• Break approved projects into components, sprints, and milestones, develop estimates with the developers doing the work, and manage execution to committed dates at a sustainable pace, keeping risks and tradeoffs visible early.
• Provide proactive, regular status to IT leadership and business stakeholders on a predictable cadence, and facilitate clear communication between the development team and the rest of the business.
• Run the team's agile practice: sprint planning, backlog grooming, stand-ups, retrospectives, and team operating metrics that balance delivery predictability, quality, reliability, and team capability.
• Conduct performance evaluations, provide ongoing coaching and mentoring at all levels, and build development plans that grow early-career developers into independent contributors.
• Define the skills the team needs as it grows, partner with HR and IT leadership on recruiting, technical interviews, and hiring recommendations that raise the team's throughput and quality, and onboard new developers into the team's standards and AI-assisted workflow.
• Contribute to the application portfolio roadmap and IT technology direction in partnership with IT leadership.
• Provide input to IT budgeting and help manage software vendor, licensing, and contractor relationships.

Hands-On Development and Technical Leadership (Approximately 40%):

• Write, review, and ship production code each sprint as a working member of the team, pairing with developers on hard problems and staying current with the codebase.
• Own the software delivery lifecycle across the application portfolio, including new development, enhancements and redesigns, integrations and APIs, modernization, technical debt reduction, and production support.
• Translate validated, field-tested prototypes into maintainable production systems, preserving the proven business workflow while re-architecting the back end as needed to meet Citadel's platform, security, data, and support standards.
• Maintain the architecture documentation, specifications, and machine-readable context files that guide AI-assisted development, and enforce a clear definition of done covering security, testing, documentation, deployment, observability, and supportability.
• Provide architectural direction across the portfolio, including system design, integration patterns, data design, reusable components, and technical debt strategy, in Citadel's primary stack (.NET, C#, web technologies, SQL Server) and its integrations with ERP, finance, identity, and other operational systems.
• Lead the team's AI-assisted development practice, setting standards for prompting, task decomposition, context management, and output review, training the team, and establishing governance for approved tool use, protection of confidential information, and AI cost and adoption.
• Perform rigorous code and design review, including review of AI-generated code for correctness, security, test coverage, maintainability, and adherence to Citadel's standards, with clear judgment about when AI can carry the work and when human design or rewrite is required.
• Oversee automated testing, CI/CD, secure development practices, observability, and release coordination, and own the production support model, including the on-call rotation, incident response, root cause communication, and runbook standards.
• Stay current with AI capabilities, development tooling, security practices, and architecture trends, and translate relevant advances into the team's practice and Citadel's technology direction.

Minimum Qualifications or Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• 8+ years of professional software development experience, including substantial hands-on work with .NET, C#, web technologies, SQL Server, API design, and system integration.
• 3+ years managing or supervising software developers, with accountability for both delivery and people, including coaching, mentoring, performance feedback, and hiring.
• Current hands-on development practice; this is a player-coach role, and candidates should be actively writing, reviewing, and shipping production code today.
• Demonstrated record of taking projects from approved concept to production across multiple concurrent efforts, using agile delivery practices, peer code review, CI/CD, and version control with Git.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI-assisted development tools as a core part of daily work (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, or comparable), including validating and refining AI-generated code before production.
• Experience owning production support, including incident response, root cause analysis, and release coordination.
• Clear, proactive communication with senior leadership and non-technical stakeholders, including status reporting and expectation management.

Preferred Qualifications or Experience:

• Experience in aviation, aerospace, manufacturing, MRO, or other regulated operational environments.
• Experience building AI-enabled features into business applications, including large language model integration, prompt engineering, or agentic workflows.
• Experience standing up or maturing software development processes at a small or mid-size company.
• Experience integrating with or supporting ERP and other operational business platforms (Microsoft Dynamics GP, Corridor Aviation, or comparable) and reporting tools such as Power BI or Crystal Reports.

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• Directly supervises the Software Developer team (approximately three to six developers as the department grows), including performance management, corrective action, and hiring recommendations in partnership with HR.
• Serves as the escalation point for the development team and coordinates with IT peers across infrastructure, security, and support.

Knowledge, Skills, and Other Attributes:

• Excellent leadership, interpersonal, and communication skills, with a constructive, solution-focused approach to challenges.
• Skilled at delegating, managing workloads, and developing the capabilities of a growing team.
• Converts vision and vetted priorities into structured execution, treating estimates, commitments, and status as professional obligations.
• Energized by building, staying hands-on in the code while leading.
• Strong architectural judgment in .NET, C#, SQL Server, web development, API design, integration patterns, and secure development practices.
• High fluency with AI-assisted development, with clear judgment about where it accelerates work and an informed view of where the field is heading.
• Embodies trust, respect, and collaboration, treats business stakeholders as partners, and builds people and systems for the long term.

Travel:

Occasional travel to other Citadel sites for project work, stakeholder collaboration, and team coordination. Travel is typically infrequent and primarily local or regional, with overnight travel only as project demands require.

Other Duties:

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties, or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

Working Conditions:

This position is considered OFFICE WORK which is characterized as follows.

• This is an on-site position based at Citadel's Dallas Love Field location, five days per week.
• Almost exclusively indoors during the day and occasionally at night.
• Occasional exposure to airborne dust in the workplace.
• Work surface is stable (flat).
• After-hours and on-call work is required for critical systems support and incident response.