Senior Technical Manager, Publishing Production Platform

The American Chemical Society (ACS), a mission-driven non-profit organization with a commercial Publications division, is seeking a Senior Technical Manager to help define and implement a future state technology publishing platform supporting its core digital scientific Journal and Book publishing program.  Based in Columbus, Ohio, the Publications Applications and Technologies Solutions (PATS) team has an existing mission-critical journal and book digital Production Platform that requires updates to maintain stable operations while migrating to a modern architecture to meet new and current business needs.
 
This is a unique opportunity to directly contribute to the technological transformation of a mission critical function that enables world-changing research.  

Primary responsibilities include but are not limited to the following:

Serves as a technology & simplification thought leader across Publications IT.
Provides advice on technical direction, systems development strategy, and future state architectures.
Evaluates new and existing application and development technologies and assists in the onboarding of those technologies and practices to the ACS.
Works with the leadership team to proactively assess and implement strategic technical direction for the Publications IT department.
Creates high-level plans and designs and executes the delivery of technology solutions to business needs, working with business and IT staff.
Learns, evaluates, supports, and improves the existing journal and book Production Platform. 
Successfully designs, develops, tests, implements and manages sophisticated business solutions with acceptable total costs of ownership.
Provides technical leadership and development expectations to both on-site and remote engineers, often managing the tasks assigned to junior developers.
Develops and updates technical documentation and facilitates knowledge transfer across the team. 
Effectively collaborates with architectural and technical operations teams to provide continuity from design to runtime. 
Provides direction on recommended best practices for software development and supporting the adherence to those practices.

Required Education:  

  College degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field. Equivalent experience may be considered as a substitute.
 

Required Skills/Certifications:   

Proficient in large-scale updates to existing and new solutions including evaluating, selecting, and implementing new technologies.
Technical skills in the following areas:

1. Content management and workflow technologies.
2. Knowledge of SQL Server and MarkLogic.
3. Unix/Linux and Windows environments, Java, web development
4. Content delivery and exchange between numerous third-party applications and vendors.

Demonstrated ability to learn and master new technologies and concepts and apply them to the workplace.
Familiarity with the Atlassian suite of tools such as JIRA, Confluence or equivalent.
Continuous improvement mindset: ability to improve business value delivered over time as well as team capabilities and velocity.
Excellent written, verbal and presentation skills, to work well in a medium-sized development team with business users and technical staff.
Ability to influence and gain commitment across organizational levels.
Future thinker, capable of being a bold leader to recommend and implement new technologies and methodologies that will benefit the ACS.
Proven leadership and technical project leadership skills.
Possess critical thinking, analytical and problem-solving skills.
Ability to plan work and deliver accurate estimates.
Ability to work collaboratively with business partners and IT to implement desired solutions.
Ability to drive investigations into and managing third party software providers and partners.
Ability to effectively lead and guide others to achieve project objectives.
Ability to quickly adapt to and respond to new project requirements.
Ability to work with and guide global, remote resources.

Required Experience:   

 A minimum of 10 years of experience with an application development team, preferably in a content-production-related field, such as information management.  Experience with digital publishing, especially of books and scientific journals, is preferred.
Demonstrated experience and capabilities for application and technical project team leadership, system and application design, system and application architectures, and hands-on development in cloud and on-premises environments.
Experience with data and application governances.
Experience with Agile and other software development lifecycles.
Experience with cloud technology.

This position is based in the Columbus, Ohio office.  ACS employees work a hybrid work schedule, consisting of working onsite, three days per week. ACS employees are in the office on Tuesday and Wednesday with the third in-office day scheduled in consultation with the manager. While always welcome to work in the office, employees may work the other two days of the week from a location of their choice. New employees are immediately eligible for this hybrid work arrangement. ACS offers relocation assistance, if applicable.

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