[Hiring] Vice President, Software Development @Young Life

Role Description

If you are currently on Young Life staff, please do not apply through this external jobs board. To apply for internal job opportunities, log in to Workday and use the Jobs Hub. Applying externally may delay your application and require you to resubmit internally.

Because of Young Life’s exclusive Christian purposes of evangelism and discipleship, Young Life shall only employ individuals or enlist volunteer leaders who:

• Profess a belief in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and Lord.
• Subscribe to the statements and policies required of all Young Life staff, including the Young Life Statement of Faith.

Employees and volunteers of Young Life, during working and nonworking hours, shall:

• Be ready, willing and able to fulfill such ministry functions as may be required by the organization.
• Refrain from conduct and statements that detract from the biblical standards taught and supported by Young Life.
• 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.
• 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.
• Defines boundaries, identity, interfaces, and data contracts with accountable partners.
• Stabilizes critical services while modernizing incrementally.
• Decides what remains in current systems; sequences migrations with reconciliation, rollback, recovery, and retirement criteria.

Deliver With Product and Experience

• Partners deeply with peers to enable product functions and joint discovery.
• Shapes useful increments, tests uncertain requirements together, and agrees on 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.

Establish Engineering and Operational Excellence

• Establishes secure engineering practices and dependable delivery.
• 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.

Manage Investment and Execution

• Owns the engineering budget and allocates approved funding and capacity among staffing, suppliers, infrastructure, operations, delivery, modernization, and technical debt.
• Reports delivery evidence, service health, costs, dependencies, and risks through GMET’s review cadence.

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.

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.
• 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.
• A record of building a multi-team engineering organization from uneven starting conditions while sustaining critical delivery.
• Deep production software expertise in system boundaries, APIs, cloud infrastructure, identity, data integrity, distributed failures, security, testing, deployment, recovery, and cost.
• Led incremental modernization of tightly coupled or vendor-centered systems while sustaining critical services.
• Built product engineering teams with Product and UX and delivered useful applications through them.
• Demonstrated stewardship of reliability, security implementation, technical debt, budgets, and suppliers.
• 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.
• Systems handling sensitive financial or personal data.

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.