Director of Research and Development

Job Description:
What You'll Own
Platform & Product Engineering

- Technical ownership of the Total Service Cloud ERP — TypeScript/Node, React, Express, Drizzle ORM on PostgreSQL, Vite, Vitest, Playwright — across features, backend correctness, and release engineering.

- Functional parity between the legacy desktop ERP and the cloud platform: a module-by-module program across Payroll, AR, AP, GL, Job Cost, Inventory, Dispatch, Sales, Purchasing, Reporting, and Banking, audited and carried to release-verified.

- The highest-stakes correctness work: general-ledger posting and reversals, payroll tax wage bases, US and Canadian tax handling, multi-tenant isolation, and permission enforcement.

- ERP-wide UX standards — authoring the conventions and holding every module to them.

- Continuity of the legacy systems that still serve customers, including a Java/Spring service layer and the VB6 desktop ERP.

Cloud Infrastructure, Reliability & Cost Governance

- Cloud architecture and operations across Azure and AWS for a multi-tenant customer fleet: App Service slots, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Key Vault, Front Door, managed identity, and infrastructure-as-code (Bicep).

- Release and deploy infrastructure: CI/CD in GitHub Actions, blue-green UAT on refreshed masked databases, deploy gates, and slot-swap workflows.

- Cloud cost governance — you own the spend, the forecast, and the optimization backlog. Recent work in this seat cut monthly Azure spend by roughly half.

- Production incident response: error triage, root-cause analysis, fleet-wide architectural calls, and uptime accountability.

Legacy-to-Cloud Migration

- End-to-end ownership of the migration program: the canonical tenant matrix, the Python/SQL Server → PostgreSQL ETL pipeline, schema canonicalization, and data-fidelity reconciliation.

- Customer production imports and go-lives, and final escalation ownership for migration data issues.

- The decommissioning path for the legacy platform, coordinated with infrastructure and legacy-ERP peers.

AI in the Software Lifecycle

- Architecture and operation of our multi-agent development pipeline (ClickUp → Claude Code → GitHub PR), including the decisions that keep it auditable and the per-task economics that keep it affordable.

- Accountable authorship for AI-assisted output — the pipeline accelerates the work; you own the result.

- Supporting internal tooling: repo/task sync automation, AI-assisted QA triage, and developer tooling experiments.

- Representing the business unit as a practitioner on AI in the SDLC, internally and to sister companies across the Constellation group.

Leadership & Representation

- Lead the engineering team: chair standups and technical syncs, author specs, split and review work, and act as merge and release gatekeeper.

- Direct QA and contractor staffing and resourcing.

- Run customer-facing onboarding and go-live directly for named accounts.

- Report the business unit's R&D and AI initiatives upward to Jonas/Constellation, and participate in cross-business-unit technical forums.

- Evaluate vendors and drive business-unit IT, security, and tenancy decisions.

What We're Looking For
Required

- Senior full-stack engineering depth in TypeScript/Node (React, Express, an ORM against PostgreSQL) with demonstrated ownership of a production application at meaningful scale.

- Strong backend correctness discipline in financial or accounting domains — GL, AR/AP, payroll, or tax — and in multi-tenant SaaS security (authorization, tenant isolation).

- Substantial cloud engineering experience on Azure and/or AWS, including infrastructure-as-code, secrets and identity management, and cost optimization.

- Data migration and ETL experience: relational-to-relational at fleet scale, with schema canonicalization and reconciliation.

- DevOps and release engineering: CI/CD, blue-green or slot-based deployment, migration safety, and production incident response.

- Practical experience