Dir Solution Development

Job Summary

Horace Mann is seeking an experienced and strategic Director Solution Development to lead the software engineering and support team within IT.

This leader will play a pivotal role in ensuring the stability, efficiency, and continuous improvement of digital platforms, balancing business priorities while driving technical excellence. The ideal candidate will possess a strong technical background, deep understanding of business needs, and exceptional decision-making skills to evaluate and prioritize requests that maximize business value.  The candidate will lead the team's adoption of agentic AI-assisted development to enhance productivity and creativity.

This role requires someone who is highly organized, confident in making firm prioritization decisions, and skilled in communicating trade-offs to stakeholders. The director must be able to navigate competing demands, align technology work with strategic goals, and create a structured approach to digital system support and incremental enhancements.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Prioritization & Business Alignment

• Evaluate and prioritize incoming requests based on business impact, urgency, and technical feasibility.
• Set clear expectations with stakeholders, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.
• Communicate trade-offs transparently, advocating for business value over reactive task execution.
• Develop a structured framework for prioritization that ensures mission-critical support needs are met while also advancing small enhancements that drive continuous improvement. 

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and empower a high-performing team responsible for support, defect resolution, and small system enhancements.
• Ensure cross-team collaboration, fostering a shared understanding of priorities, dependencies, and technical solutions.
• Create and uphold accountability structures to ensure work is completed efficiently and with high quality.
• Drive a culture of ownership, problem-solving, and continuous learning.
• Champion and personally drive the team's use of agentic AI tools to boost team creativity, efficiency, and skill development. 

Operational Excellence & Process Improvement

• Establish and refine processes for managing digital defects, incidents, and enhancement requests, ensuring smooth workflows and minimal disruption.
• Improve and implement best practices for ticketing, resolution timelines, and stakeholder communication.
• Analyze trends in defects and enhancement requests to identify opportunities for proactive improvements and efficiency gains.
• Drive continuous innovation by incorporating emerging trends and tools, including agentic AI, into project workflows. 

Technical & Business Understanding

• Serve as the bridge between technology teams and business stakeholders, ensuring both sides understand priorities, constraints, and impacts.
• Maintain a strong technical grasp of digital systems, workflows, and potential challenges, ensuring informed decision-making.
• Provide guidance on best practices for system stability, scalability, and continuous improvement. 

Stakeholder Communication & Expectation Management

• Set firm but fair expectations with business stakeholders, ensuring they understand how and why prioritization decisions are made.
• Provide regular updates on progress, challenges, and key outcomes related to support and enhancements.
• Communicate realistic timelines, risks, and trade-offs when managing requests.

Qualifications:

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field. 

Experience

• 6+ years of experience in IT leadership, with a focus on managing digital operations, technical support, and system enhancements.
• Proven track record of making strategic prioritization decisions that drive business value.
• Strong background in technical support, bug resolution, and application enhancement.
• Experience implementing agentic AI development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) and driving team-wide adoption in engineering workflows. 

Skills & Competencies:

Technical & Business Expertise

• Strong understanding of digital applications, software development lifecycles, and IT support models.
• Ability to translate business needs into technical priorities and vice versa.
• Familiarity with modern ticketing systems (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps) and IT service management best practices.
• Hands-on proficiency with agentic AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex — not just chat-based AI assistants — to enhance development workflows.
• Fluency in prompt and context engineering — structuring instructions, memory, and tool access so an agent behaves reliably — and experience building reusable tooling (custom skills or commands, hooks, MCP integrations) around agentic coding assistants, not just ad hoc prompting.
• Understanding of the cost and reliability tradeoffs of agentic workflows at team scale — token usage, model selection, and when a task needs a human in the loop versus full autonomy. 

Decision-Making & Prioritization

• Ability to assess competing priorities and make firm, strategic decisions.
• Skilled in identifying high-impact improvements while maintaining system stability.
• Experience in building structured prioritization frameworks for IT support and enhancement requests. 

Leadership & Communication

• Strong people leadership skills, with the ability to motivate and guide teams in a fast-paced environment.
• Ability to set clear expectations and communicate priorities firmly yet diplomatically to stakeholders.
• Experience in negotiating and influencing senior leaders on digital priorities and trade-offs.
• Insists on verifying AI-generated work against real evidence — tests passing, logs, the actual deployed state — rather than accepting confident-sounding output at face value.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leading IT support and continuous improvement teams in a large enterprise environment.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), ITIL frameworks, and Agile methodologies.
• Strong understanding of metrics-driven decision-making and process optimization.
• Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification (or equivalent process-improvement credential) preferred.

Salary Range: $105,200 - $147,950

• Salary is commensurate to experience, location, etc.