Unknown company
Director, Software Engineering Smart Mobility
TransCore (TRN), a subsidiary of ST Engineering, is seeking a hands-on Director of Software Engineering to lead our Smart Mobility engineering team in Atlanta, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; or Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
About the Role:
TransCore is building Smart Mobility, a cloud-native mobility platform that lets people move through tolling and transit from their phone connecting the agencies, partners, and consumer apps behind it.
This position will own Smart Mobility delivery end to end, bringing the mobile, backend, integration, and account-management work together into one product that ships reliably, securely, and on a predictable cadence, and that scales as we grow.
The Director of Software Engineering will set how the group builds: clear delivery practices, strong quality and security standards, and create a team structure that grows with the product. This role will partner with the Smart Mobility Architecture function, which owns technical direction, and turn that direction into working software.
Reporting & Organizational Context:
The Director of Software Engineering will own Smart Mobility engineering delivery end to end. To start, while the team is small and growing, this role reports to the VP, Smart Mobility Architecture. As engineering scales, it is expected to stand up as its own pillar with dedicated leadership. The VP, Smart Mobility Architecture represents this work at the leadership table alongside the Chief Architect, Head of Platform Engineering. The Director of Software Engineering runs the Smart Mobility product.
The Director leads the Smart Mobility engineering teams directly and owns the relationships with every team that contributes to the product: beacon and phone integration, backend and integration, account management, and UX. Several of these are shared resources today. It will drive the shift to a full-allocation model and, for anyone not directly under supervision, establish and own clear working agreements that define commitments, allocations, and escalation paths.
What Success Looks Like (First Year):
Illustrative targets, to be refined with the VP, Smart Mobility Architecture:
- First ~3 months: A single, unified Smart Mobility delivery plan and a predictable release cadence across all workstreams.
- By ~6 months: Consistent releases with defined quality gates; QA / Test Automation and DevOps functions stood up; and a stable team structure with named engineering leads.
- Working agreements: Clear, owned working agreements are in place with every partner and shared team, with a defined path toward full allocation.
- Reliability: Production reliability operating to defined SLOs against the availability target.
Key Responsibilities:
- Engineering Delivery Ownership
- End-to-end delivery: Own delivery from staffing and sprint execution through release, accountable for shipping the complete product.
- Unify the build: Bring the mobile, backend, integration, and account-management work under one coherent delivery plan.
- Predictable execution: Own release cadence, quality gates, and delivery commitments; surface and resolve risks early.
- Reliability and security: Own the engineering team that handles Tier 3 execution and support for Smart Mobility, and back the Tier 1/2 support managed by the separate 24x7 operations team. Drive the SLOs behind the availability target, along with security and PCI-DSS controls, partnering with DevOps on CI/CD.
- People Leadership & Organization Building
- Enable and empower the teams: Create the conditions for engineering teams to design and build with autonomy, clear goals, and the support to deliver.
- Build and grow the team: Own hiring for Smart Mobility engineering, including the headcount plan and engineering budget, and develop engineers and leads through coaching, mentoring, and performance management.
- Operating structure: Set the team structure and engineering leads, and coordinate with partner organizations to stand up shared functions such as QA / Test Automation and DevOps (establishing them, not owning them). Keep Scrum facilitation separate from the engineers building the product.
- Culture: Set a high engineering bar and create an environment where strong engineers do their best work.
- Cross-Functional & Partner Orchestration
- Product and Program Management: Partner with Product and Program Management to align delivery with outcomes, roadmaps, and timelines. Product owns the “what”; you own the “how” and the delivery, working with the Product Manager and Technical Program Manager.
- Partner-team ownership: Own the working agreements, allocations, and delivery commitments with partners, loaned, and vendor teams, including contracted partners such as the Infinity team, where you influence the Smart Mobility statement of work. Drive the shift from shared to fully allocated resources, and escalate unresolved conflicts to the VP, Smart Mobility Architecture.
- Architecture decision rights: Turn the architecture function’s direction into executable plans and feed implementation experience back. Architecture owns target-state design and standards; you own implementation choices, sequencing, and build-versus-defer decisions within those standards, with disputes resolved at the VP, Smart Mobility Architecture.
- Platform partnership: Consume and integrate the shared capabilities provided by the Platform Engineering organization rather than building parallel infrastructure, and partner with the Chief Architect, Head of Platform Engineering on platform needs.
- Stakeholder communication: Report delivery status, risks, and tradeoffs to senior leadership with clarity and candor.
- Technical Leadership
- Hands-on credibility: Stay close to the code and architecture to make sound tradeoffs and review key decisions, without becoming the bottleneck.
- Engineering excellence: Drive code quality, testing, automation, and operational readiness across cloud-native, microservices-based systems.
Key Skills & Experience:
- Delivery leadership: Proven track record owning end-to-end delivery of complex software products, accountable for shipping on cadence and at quality.
- People management: Demonstrated success building, managing, and growing engineering teams, including hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers and leads.
- Modern tech stack: Strong grounding in cloud-native systems (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP), microservices, event-driven architecture (Kafka/RabbitMQ), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), .NET/Java frameworks, and API standards (REST/GraphQL).
- Agile delivery: Deep experience leading Agile/Scrum teams across sprint execution, backlog flow, and delivery coordination, partnering with Product, Architecture, Design, QA, DevOps, and hardware engineering.
- Reliability and compliance: Experience delivering high-availability systems with strong security and compliance discipline, including PCI-DSS.
- Payments / fintech (a plus): Familiarity with payment gateways, digital wallets, settlement workflows, and high-security transaction processing.
- Hardware / edge familiarity (a plus): Comfort delivering systems that interface with IoT devices, roadside hardware, edge gateways, or telematics, and high-volume real-time data ingestion.
- Mobile delivery (a plus): Experience shipping consumer-facing iOS and Android applications.
Qualifications:
- Experience: Substantial software engineering experience (typically 14+ years), including significant experience leading and managing engineering teams with direct delivery accountability (typically 8+ years), or equivalent demonstrated ability.
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degree a plus.
- Track record: Demonstrated success delivering high-volume, high-availability software in regulated industries (Mobility, FinTech, Logistics, or similar), including building or scaling the team that delivered it.
- Zero to one: Experience standing up or scaling engineering organizations and delivery processes from an early stage.
- Communication: Strong communication skills and the ability to lead and align diverse, cross-functional, and partner teams.
Preferred Experience:
- Background in mobility, transportation, tolling, parking, or logistics technologies.
- Experience coordinating delivery across in-house and partner / vendor engineering teams.
- Experience applying AI/ML to improve workflow, automation, or product intelligence.
- Experience with multi-tenant platforms, SDKs, or developer / ecosystem enablement.
Physical Demands/Work Environment
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit for extended periods of time. Requires frequent use of keyboard and mouse, and must be able to wear a headset for prolonged periods. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate. This is a hybrid position that requires regular in-office attendance, in line with team expectations.
TransCore complies with federal and state disability laws and provides reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities.
Equal Opportunity Employer / Protected Veterans / Individuals with Disabilities
This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.