Associate Director of Conservation Application Development

The Associate Director of Conservation Application Development is a key member of the Conservation & Geospatial Systems team in TNC’s Information Technology (IT) department. The individual reports to the Director of Conservation & Geospatial Systems and works with the management team to develop and enact the team’s technology strategy. The Associate Director works closely with Conservation & Geospatial Systems staff to design, deliver and support conservation applications that enable conservation practitioners and scientists to achieve TNC’s mission. 

The Associate Director for Conservation Application Development is the lead for application development, principally but not exclusively for the Conservation Hub, the core application for recording and monitoring progress towards TNC’s 2030 conservation goals. The Associate Director manages a team of application developers and architects and is in charge of establishing and overseeing technical standards and software development life cycle processes and best practices. As a supervisor, the Associate Director is responsible for establishing and ensuring accountability for team and individual staff and guiding the skills development and career growth of the technical team. This role is also responsible for managing small technical initiatives and projects and leading collaboration across IT to ensure that conservation applications integrate with enterprise architecture and systems. This includes exploring the utilization of technologies such as cloud infrastructure and services, modern integrations and automation. 
 

Do you enjoy leading technical teams in the design, development, support and maintenance of mission critical applications? This is an exceptional career opportunity for a highly motivated, capable individual interested in joining the world’s leading conservation organization.

The ideal candidate will have a balance of experience in application design and development with technical team management. 

RESPONSIBILITES 
•    Contributes to strategy, resource and technology planning for the Conservation & Geospatial Systems team.
•    Manages the Conservation Application Development team, including establishing clear work and professional development objectives and performance expectations. 
•    Ensures effective communication and collaboration with Conservation Hub team members, IT colleagues and business partners. 
•    Establishes and oversees technical standards and processes, and ensures quality of products, for the Conservation Hub and other conservation applications. 
•    Sets standards for application support, incident response and maintenance. 
•    Supports the technical team in making, recording and communicating architectural and solution design decisions.
•    Collaborates closely with the Conservation Hub Product Owner to coordinate technical and conservation business priorities within Agile sprints.
•    Participates in some Agile scrum ceremonies and supports Agile methodologies for process improvements.
•    Oversees cross-training and backup plans and may occasionally execute software developer tasks such as writing code and reviewing pull requests.
•    Maintains TNC business practices in collaboration with the appropriate stakeholders and maintains a strong collaborative working relationship with business owners and IT teams. 

•    Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.   
•    8 years of experience in Information Technology with relevant experience with full stack application development.
•    5 years of supervisory experience in leading and mentoring technical staff in the development and usage of cloud technology and web applications.
•    Experience of contemporary web application architecture and design, with deep experience in one or more web development frameworks including Angular, React, and/or Vue.
•    Experience with Agile methodology in software development. 

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS
•    Experience developing web-based production applications using .NET Framework.
•    Experience in SQL and relational database modeling. 
•    Fluency with CI/CD toolsets such as CloudFormation and BitBucket Pipelines.
•    Familiarity with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code tools.
•    Experience writing production single-page applications (SPA) using the Angular development framework.
•    Experience with, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript ES6, and REST API services.
•    Strongly familiarity with Amazon Web Services in understanding the building blocks of cloud infrastructure. 
•    Experience managing work using Jira/Atlassian Suite or similar task and documentation management tool.
•    Familiarity with Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies.
•    Be an innovative thinker and passionate in their pursuit of world class technology enabled business solutions. 
•    Be a strong leader, skilled communicator, and active partner, adept in interpreting and understanding the needs of the enterprise while translating those needs into technology architectures and solutions that are enduring and of high quality.
•    Foster a supportive, inclusive, respectful and safe work environment.
•    Cultivate a learning culture by encouraging training in core competencies, technologies and organizational business practices.
•    Experience working for a global, decentralized nonprofit organization. 
•    Multi-lingual skills and multi-cultural or cross-cultural experience appreciated.