Director, Research and Development

Key Responsibilities



* Define and execute the technology and development strategy for the LocalGov business unit.


* Provide leadership and oversight for all software development activities across eight product lines and approximately 40+ development professionals.


* Advance LocalGov's development teams along the Harris AI-SDLC maturity model - from AI-assisted work, to AI-directed work, to agentic delivery in which AI agents own bounded work end to end while engineers set goals, define guardrails, and review outcomes.


* Lead modernization efforts across IBM i, RPG, and modern technology platforms while preserving customer stability and business continuity.


* Establish engineering standards, development methodologies, and governance processes to improve quality, predictability, and delivery performance.


* Partner with Product Management, Client Services, Professional Services, Sales, and Business Unit leadership to align development priorities with customer and business needs.


* Develop and maintain multi-year product and technology roadmaps across the LocalGov portfolio.


* Build, develop, and mentor engineering leaders and technical teams while fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement.


* Oversee development capacity planning, resource allocation, and prioritization across competing initiatives and product lines.


* Use AI development tools personally and daily, and champion their use across the organization - including GitHub Copilot, Project Bob, large language models, and agentic coding tools - holding a current, practical command of what they can and cannot do rather than relying on secondhand reporting.


* Establish and monitor KPIs that measure outcomes rather than activity - cycle time, development throughput, escaped defect and escalation rates, delivery predictability, customer satisfaction, and development cost as a percentage of revenue - and report AI delivery maturity and the business outcomes it produces on a recurring executive cadence.


* Own the LocalGov AI delivery-maturity roadmap across all eight product lines, applied stage by stage across the software lifecycle rather than as a single business-unit rating, and deliver against the maturity targets agreed with executive leadership.


* Stand up the governance that makes delegated agent work safe, including review gates, validation, and security review of AI-generated code, with quality standards applied equally to human-written and AI-generated code.


* Make the LocalGov codebase and delivery pipeline accessible to AI agents through documentation, test coverage, CI/CD, and structured context.


* Apply AI directly to the IBM i and RPG estate - legacy code comprehension, documentation generation, and modernization analysis - as a primary mechanism for preserving knowledge held by an aging and retiring RPG skillset.


* Build the tooling and training program that moves e...