Vice President, Software Development

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Because of Young Life’s exclusive Christian purposes of evangelism and discipleship as set forth in its Articles of Incorporation and in these Bylaws, and to reflect what has always been and will continue to be the position of Young Life, specifically the Christian belief that each and every employee and volunteer of the corporation should minister as a servant of God with the primary responsibility of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and, as such, is an integral part of the Christian mission and ministry of the corporation,
Young Life shall only employ individuals or enlist volunteer leaders who: (a) profess a belief in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and Lord; and (b) subscribe to the statements and policies required of all Young Life staff, including the Young Life Statement of Faith. Therefore, employees and volunteers of Young Life, during working and nonworking hours, shall: (i) be ready, willing and able to fulfill such ministry functions as may be required by the organization; (ii) refrain from conduct and statements that detract from the biblical standards taught and supported by Young Life, and (iii) abide by all policies and practices of Young Life including, without limitation, those related to religious belief or ministry activities.

At Young Life, our mission is to introduce adolescents to Jesus Christ and help them grow in their faith. We invite you to join us in this life-changing work, building relationships and creating spaces where young people feel seen, known, and loved.

Build the Engineering Organization

• Builds and leads Product and Application Engineering alongside Platform Engineering. Recruits proven managers and senior technical leaders against the funded plan; establishes distributed team ownership, delegated authority, performance expectations, succession, and coaching through those leaders.
• Builds a culture of ownership and learning. Teams raise risks early, challenge designs constructively, share knowledge, and own production outcomes. Turns incidents into corrective actions that prevent recurrence while sustaining a healthy delivery pace.

Modernize the Architecture

• Sets engineering architecture and modernization direction across applications, integrations, vendor platforms, and assigned infrastructure. Define boundaries, identity, interfaces, and data contracts with accountable partners. Recruit or develop senior technical capacity to own architecture and delivery.
• Stabilizes critical services while modernizing incrementally. Decides what remains in current systems; sequences migrations with reconciliation, rollback, recovery, and retirement criteria. Builds shared capabilities against demonstrated needs and chooses build, buy, reuse, or partner based on mission value, risk, and lifecycle cost.

Deliver With Product and Experience

• Partners deeply with the peers to enable product functions and joint discovery. Shapes useful increments, tests uncertain requirements together, and agrees scope, capacity, completion evidence, and responses to delivery risk.
• Builds for global, volunteer-led ministry, including accessibility, localization, mobile use, limited connectivity, and regional privacy and operating requirements. Validates capabilities with intended users and accountable partners.

Establish Engineering and Operational Excellence

• Establishes secure engineering practices and dependable delivery: design and code review, automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, dependency and secrets management, and launch readiness. Ensures assigned infrastructure and services have owners, observability, on-call coverage, incident response with Security and Service Delivery, and tested recovery.
• Adopts approved AI-assisted and agentic workflows where verified outcomes justify them. Requires least-privilege access, protected data, reviewable changes, automated evaluation, and human approval for consequential actions. Retains accountable human owners and measures quality, reliability, productivity, and cost.

Manage Investment and Execution

• Owns the engineering budget and allocates approved funding and capacity among staffing, suppliers, infrastructure, operations, delivery, modernization, and technical debt within delegated financial authority. Make lifecycle cost and tradeoffs visible; escalate changes beyond that authority.
• Reports delivery evidence, service health, costs, dependencies, and risks through GMET’s review cadence. Resolves engineering decisions through accountable leaders; brings executive decisions with options, a recommendation, and the consequence of delay.

Supervisory Responsibilities

• Manages professional teams composed of individual contributors and/or supervisors.
• Sets clear ownership, priorities, and performance expectations, and delegates real authority.
• Participates in the interview and selection process, provides training and mentorship, offers career development guidance, and is engaged in performance management. 
• Provides timely and constructive coaching and feedback; develops staff and provides challenging opportunities.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited university or college, preferably in a job related major field of study
• Minimum fifteen (15) years of relevant professional experience, including leading and managing complex initiatives or programs with outcome focused deliverables, 
• Or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Minimum eight (8) years of managerial experience
• Typically 15 or more years in software engineering and leadership, including at least seven years leading teams and experience leading managers and senior technical leaders; equivalent demonstrated scope and impact considered.
• A record of building a multi-team engineering organization from uneven starting conditions while sustaining critical delivery, with evidence of strong hiring, manager development, delegated ownership, and performance improvement.
• Deep production software expertise in system boundaries, APIs, cloud infrastructure, identity, data integrity, distributed failures, security, testing, deployment, recovery, and cost. Able to inspect consequential designs, explain tradeoffs, and earn engineers’ trust through sound judgment.
• Led incremental modernization of tightly coupled or vendor-centered systems while sustaining critical services. Can explain migration choices, failures, corrective actions, retired dependencies, and measured results.
• Built product engineering teams with Product and UX and delivered useful applications through them, including credible commitments, incremental releases, recovery from missed milestones, and ownership through production operation.
• Demonstrated stewardship of reliability, security implementation, technical debt, budgets, and suppliers. Strong executive communication and cross-cultural change leadership; practical judgment applying AI-assisted and agentic engineering with controls and verified outcomes.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience. 
• Personal commitment to Young Life’s Christian mission and required staff statements and policies.

Preferred Experience

Global or distributed engineering; low-connectivity applications; Salesforce modernization; identity and integration platforms; and systems handling sensitive financial or personal data. Relevant outcomes matter more than a particular vendor or employer.

Job Specific Working Conditions:

The anticipated salary rate for this position can range from $132,050.00 - $182,850.00 depending on relevant experience and education, working location, and scheduled weekly hours.