Deputy Application Development Lead

Job Description

Overview

Our federal client-facing program is seeking a Deputy Application Development Lead to support a 20‐person development team delivering enterprise applications across multiple technology stacks. The Deputy will partner closely with the AppDev Lead and Program Manager to ensure stable, predictable delivery within a fast‐paced Agile environment.

This is a critical leadership position—ideal for a highly organized, technically fluent professional who can bridge hands‐on engineering knowledge with people leadership, task oversight, and customer engagement.

Key Responsibilities

Team & Delivery Leadership

• Serve as the right hand to the Application Development Lead, helping manage, coordinate, and oversee daily operations of a 20‐developer team.
• Track staff workloads, responsiveness, sprint commitments, and performance to ensure balanced distribution and timely delivery.
• Support Agile delivery processes including sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand‐ups, demos, and retrospectives.
• Identify delivery risks early and recommend corrective actions.
• Provide day‐to‐day task direction to developers and remove blockers to maintain team velocity.

Technical Oversight & Quality Assurance

• Review code contributions, technical designs, and work products to ensure adherence to standards and security requirements.
• Coordinate with senior developers to maintain consistency in architecture, development practices, and documentation.
• Support quality checks for all releases—ensuring code completeness, testing coverage, and readiness for deployment.
• Troubleshoot complex technical issues and support escalation handling for defects, outages, or production-impacting events.

Stakeholder & Customer Engagement

• Act as a secondary point of contact for client discussions, requirements clarification, and status updates when the AppDev Lead is unavailable.
• Translate customer needs into actionable tasks for the development team.
• Support preparation of briefings, reports, and sprint metrics for government leadership.

Process Improvement & Governance

• Assist in driving continuous improvement in development practices, CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps workflows, and documentation.
• Maintain discipline in configuration management and environment governance across platforms and repositories.
• Help enforce compliance with federal security, privacy, and change‐management standards.

Required Technical Skills

Candidates must have hands-on familiarity with multiple components of the team’s stack, including:

• Development Tools: Visual Studio, VS Code, Azure Data Studio
• Cloud / DevOps: Azure DevOps (repos, pipelines, boards), GitHub
• Web & Application Servers: IIS
• Programming Languages: C#, .NET Framework/.NET Core, ColdFusion (desired but not required)
• Databases: SQL Server, Oracle
• Version Control: Git, GitHub, Azure Repos
• Other: Understanding of modern Agile, GitFlow, secure coding practices

This is not a full hands‐on coding role, but strong technical understanding is required to lead effectively.

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 7–10 years of experience in software development, system integration, or application engineering.
• 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership, team lead, or senior developer role.
• Demonstrated experience working in an Agile environment supporting distributed teams.
• Strong communication skills and ability to run meetings, coordinate tasks, and guide junior developers.
• Experience supporting government clients and understanding PMO/stakeholder expectations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading multi‐technology development teams.
• Prior deputy‐lead, scrum master, or project lead experience.
• Experience with DevSecOps principles and CI/CD automation.
• Familiarity with federal cyber and compliance requirements.
• Certifications such as Scrum Master, Azure Developer/Administrator, Security+, or PMP (not required but advantageous).

What Makes This Role Attractive

• Opportunity to step into a recognized leadership track with clear upward mobility.
• High-impact role within the program’s most visible and mission-critical technical team.
• Ability to influence architecture, team culture, process improvement, and future technology adoption.
• Close daily interaction with senior technical leaders, the PMO, and federal clients.