R&D Manager (VD)

Job Overview:
The R&D Manager is responsible for leading the Product R&D organization and ensuring the successful design, development, and delivery of the company’s software products and solutions. This role manages the Solution Architects and Project Managers and provides overall leadership across the development, Business Analysis, and Quality Assurance teams managed by the Project Managers.
The R&D Manager is accountable for ensuring that product initiatives have clear technical direction, well-defined delivery plans, appropriate resources, and effective execution. The role works closely with Solution Architects, Project Managers, Product Management, and company leadership to translate product and business priorities into executable development plans and ensure teams deliver high-quality, scalable solutions on schedule.
The ideal candidate combines strong software development and technical leadership experience with excellent delivery management skills and is comfortable working across architecture, product requirements, development, QA, and project execution.

Key Responsibilities:
R&D Leadership & Team Management:
• Lead and manage the Solution Architects and Project Managers within the Product R&D organization.
• Establish clear responsibilities, priorities, and performance expectations for the R&D organization.
• Coach and develop Solution Architects and Project Managers, helping them strengthen their technical leadership, planning, problem-solving, and team-management capabilities.
• Ensure effective collaboration among Architecture, Project Management, Development, Business Analysis, and QA.
• Identify resource, capability, and skills gaps and develop plans to address them through mentoring, training, hiring, or allocation of resources.
Technical Leadership & Architecture Oversight:
• Work closely with Solution Architects to establish and maintain the technical direction for products and major development initiatives.
• Ensure Solution Architects are actively guiding development teams through technical research, solution design, proof-of-concepts, architecture decisions, and complex implementation challenges.
• Review significant architecture and technology decisions and ensure appropriate consideration of scalability, performance, security, maintainability, integration, and long-term product direction.
• Ensure technical research and proof-of-concept activities have clear objectives, evaluation criteria, and decisions or recommendations resulting from the work.
• Facilitate resolution of complex technical issues that cannot be resolved within individual development teams.
• Promote consistency in architecture, engineering standards, development practices, and technology choices across teams.
Product Development & Delivery Management:
• Work with Project Managers to translate product priorities and requirements into realistic development and delivery plans.
• Ensure projects have clearly defined epics, features, user stories, dependencies, milestones, and release plans.
• Review project and sprint plans with Project Managers to ensure teams have a clear path from requirements through development, testing, release, and deployment.
• Monitor delivery progress across product initiatives and proactively identify schedule, scope, resource, dependency, and technical risks.
• Hold Project Managers accountable for actively managing their teams, resolving impediments, and maintaining accurate project plans and delivery forecasts.
• Intervene when projects are not progressing as expected and work with the appropriate teams to establish corrective action plans.
• Ensure dependencies between development teams and product components are identified and actively managed.
Requirements & Solution Readiness:
• Ensure Business Analysts and Project Managers work with stakeholders to develop sufficiently clear and complete requirements before development begins.
• Ensure technical feasibility and architecture considerations are addressed early in the requirements and planning process.
• Promote effective collaboration among BAs, Solution Architects, developers, and QA so that requirements are understood consistently across the delivery team.
• Ensure development teams have the information, designs, decisions, and acceptance criteria required to execute effectively.
Quality & Engineering Excellence:
• Establish expectations for software quality throughout the development lifecycle rather than relying solely on final-stage testing.
• Work with Project Managers and QA teams to ensure appropriate test planning, functional testing, regression testing, defect management, and release readiness.
• Monitor recurring defects, technical debt, performance issues, and other quality concerns and ensure appropriate corrective actions are implemented.
• Promote code quality, design reviews, code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, documentation, and other sound software engineering practices.
• Ensure releases meet agreed functional, technical, performance, security, and quality expectations.

Planning, Governance & Reporting:
• Establish consistent R&D planning and governance practices across projects and product teams.
• Maintain visibility into development priorities, resource allocation, release schedules, major dependencies, risks, and delivery status.
• Conduct regular reviews with Solution Architects and Project Managers to assess technical progress, delivery status, risks, and required decisions.
• Provide leadership with clear and accurate reporting on R&D progress, delivery forecasts, significant risks, resource needs, and technical issues.
• Ensure Jira and other development-management tools accurately reflect planned and in-progress work and provide meaningful visibility into execution.
Continuous Improvement & Innovation:
• Identify opportunities to improve development processes, team productivity, software quality, and delivery predictability.
• Encourage structured evaluation and adoption of new technologies, development approaches, tools, and AI capabilities where they provide meaningful business or engineering value.
• Establish mechanisms for sharing technical knowledge, architectural patterns, lessons learned, and best practices across development teams.
• Use delivery and quality metrics to identify systemic issues and drive continuous improvement across the R&D organization.

Qualifications: