Elections Software Development Manager

The Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting. Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business. More than half the world's population sees AP journalism every day.



The Associated Press is seeking to hire the Elections Software Development Manager within the Technology Engineering organization, to be based remotely, with a primary focus on AP elections technology.



Reporting to the Software Development Director and working closely with leadership on both the revenue and editorial teams, the Elections Software Development Manager has the primary responsibility for building, maintaining, and advancing the AP’s elections technology platform. The Elections Software Development Manager will be a leader on a highly dynamic team that operates within the fast-paced and rapidly changing domain of U.S. elections. The Elections Software Development Manager is a quick-thinking solution-oriented leader who excels at communicating complex technical systems to non-technical audiences.



The Elections Software Development Manager will have direct responsibility for the technology that supports ingestion of elections related data, processing and storage of this data, internal workflows across operations and editorial decision making, and any integrations with internal systems or external vendor technology. A successful Elections Software Development Manager will have a strong background using Amazon Web Services, specifically serverless technologies.



The Elections Software Development Manager will be responsible for direct reports of software engineers who work within the elections program. The manager will assign work, review development task breakouts and plans, review code for quality and completeness, and review QA test case coverage and test output. The manager works with software development directors and architects to receive technical guidance for advancing the platform. The software development manager assumes a hands-on role to assist delivery or generating development patterns to be followed by the team. This position also drives continuous integration, continuous deliver and guides continuous improvement of the deployment process, with an eye toward automation.



The Elections Software Development Manager will collaborate with election operations and editorial leadership to develop and communicate the vision for AP’s elections platform and customer facing elections data service.



The Elections Software Development Manager will work with election operations, editorial and technology leadership to develop and lead active, online support coverage for live election events. The manager is a critical part of the elections escalation process and helps drive support and triage improvement.



Candidates for the Elections Software Development Manager position should be intensely curious, highly motivated and deeply interested in the U.S. Elections process. Candidates should understand that they and their team are often needed for real-time support of high-profile election events that occur outside traditional business hours.



Responsibilities :

Requirements comprehension: Work directly with stakeholders, program management and users to identify, vet and understand new requirements for the AP platform. Ensure requirements are documented in a clear manner for the engineering team.



Software development management: Work with team members to break down requirements into clear development tasks. Engage software architects for larger tasks that impact the system outside of functionality. Track development progress with team members daily and communicate status to technology leadership. Review code to ensure architectural, development, security and quality patterns are consistently applied. Ensure features and defects are documented, tracked, reported on and resolved in timely manner including root cause analysis.



Live Election Support: Produce technical support plans for resource coverage during live election events. Participate in and lead support activities. Be a point person to address technical questions and issues that arise from internal and external customers.



Communication: Exhibit the ability to translate deeply technical concepts to non-technical audiences including AP executive management, domain leaders, and customers.



Automation: Demonstrate a passion for continuous improvement through refactoring and automation. Define and track metrics to drive automation advancement.



Availability: Ensure all existing and new components of the elections platform maintain high availability and geographic redundancy. Create disaster recovery plans and drive the regular assessment and testing of these plans.



Strategic alignment: Contribute technical vision to editorial and business colleagues as input to product strategy.



Manage, develop, and oversee a team of 2-5 software engineers. Conduct interviews for contractors as well as full time employees, providing feedback and guiding hiring decisions for the team. Provide technical mentorship to software engineers to help counsel professional growth.



Experience:

10+ years hands-on software engineering experience working on high exposure, business critical systems.



Proven track record of leading successful software delivery initiatives in AWS.



Strong understanding of agile or lean based software development methodologies and best practices.



Experience with continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated workflows and systems.



Deep experience with Amazon Web Services with hands on experience with serverless AWS technologies.



Experience developing and maintaining highly available cloud-based platforms. Experience identifying performance issues for AWS based systems and hands on practice of tuning system performance.



Experience leading teams through the troubleshooting of priority 1, mission critical systems.



Excellent verbal and written communication skills.



Compensation & Benefits: Base salary range of 160,000 – 180,000, contingent on experience and other job-related factors. Employees are eligible to participate, according to the terms of the official plan documents, in a 401(k) plan, employer-sponsored health insurance plan, and are eligible for paid time off and holidays in accordance with AP policy.



We will consider strong candidates who do not meet every listed qualification. You may use a cover letter to describe the unique qualifications you would bring to this role.



Application deadline is 11:59 PM ET on May 7, 2024



AP seeks to build an inclusive organization grounded in respect for differences. We support all aspects of diversity and provide equal employment opportunity to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, marital status, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or status as a veteran. We encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply.