Head of Technology: Global Retirement & Workplace Solutions
Morningstar, Inc., a leading global provider of independent investment research, is looking for an innovative and visionary leader to serve in the key role of Head of Technology for our Global Retirement & Workplace Solutions business.
The Global Retirement and Workplace Solutions team focuses on helping individuals achieve better outcomes by working with institutional clients in the global defined contribution and workplace markets. This is a high growth area for Morningstar and houses a diverse product suite and unique client base. By constantly evolving our solutions and solving our client's problems, we believe we are positioned well for continued future growth. Our teams of technologists consist of talented software engineers, test engineers, quality assurance analysts, and architects who help make technology one of Morningstar’s core strengths. Our technologists care deeply about creating compelling user experiences, represent a range of skills and knowledge and share the view of technology as a craft. From agile techniques to software as a service (SaaS) and configurations to meet the specific needs of our demanding institutional clients we build scalable, elegant solutions that help investors reach their financial goals. The immediate need is to help take our established technology environment and evolve it to help meet our long list of priorities, including core functionality enhancements, client requests and internal security upgrades, while also building our next generation retirement plan marketplace.
The Head of Technology will report directly to the President, Global Retirement & Workplace Solutions. The selected candidate will take responsibility for the overall planning, execution, and success of technical projects; operating with scale, speed and quality. Working with other key technology and business leaders, the selected individual will establish best engineering practices and influence them through solid design decisions, processes, and tools across the broader engineering organization. The Head of Technology will oversee a team of senior level engineers and will work with other areas such as Product, Design, Investment Management and Client Solutions to constantly evolve our strategy to produce better end user outcomes and relevant offerings in the market.
Responsibilities- Lead strategic technological planning to achieve business goals by prioritizing technology initiatives and determining future direction of the group's technical strategy
- Develop and contribute to the Workplace business plans, staffing, budgeting and process decisions that support both long-term and short-term objectives of the group
- Work with team leads to continuously upgrade platforms, prioritizing initiatives that have the biggest impact on technical debt for the products
- Partner closely with product leaders on strategic planning process, aligning technology vision and strategy with product and business direction, customer service strategy, growth strategies, and talent strategies
- Own non-functional requirements, technology standards, architectural direction, technical documentation, and quality of the code
- Maintain the highest levels of security, promoting a culture and practice of security awareness
- Assess and monitor the impact of new technologies on our markets and product lines
Requirements- 10+ years of experience managing sizable, global technology organizations, with proven team building and leadership skills
- Bachelors of Science in CIS or related major required
- Must have experience working with institutional clients in the financial and/or retirement market
- Ability to interface and project confidence and clarity directly with senior leaders both internally at Morningstar and externally with institutional clients
- Ability to convert strategic plans into actionable programs and projects
- Ability to attract and retain talent for both the Retirement & Workplace business and the company as a whole
- Ability to create and promote a culture of technology excellence and innovation
- Experience with .NET C#, full stack JavaScript (node.js), AWS and Java preferred
- Experience with agile principles including test-driven development, continuous integration and test automation
- Creative thinker with the ability to solve problems
- Ability to evaluate external teams to augment work when appropriate
- Ability to communicate the technical possibilities and limitations of systems to non-technical colleagues in meaningful and constructive ways
- Pragmatist who is bold, willing to think big, and encourage teams to act decisively
- A belief in embracing both open-source and commercial tools and frameworks as well as SaaS, and having proven experience in making tradeoffs between competing alternatives
Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.
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