Dir Solution Development

Job Summary

Horace Mann is seeking an experienced and strategic Director Solution Development to lead the software engineering and support team within IT.

This leader will play a pivotal role in ensuring the stability, efficiency, and continuous improvement of digital platforms, balancing business priorities while driving technical excellence. The ideal candidate will possess a strong technical background, deep understanding of business needs, and exceptional decision-making skills to evaluate and prioritize requests that maximize business value. The candidate will lead the team's adoption of agentic AI-assisted development to enhance productivity and creativity.

This role requires someone who is highly organized, confident in making firm prioritization decisions, and skilled in communicating trade-offs to stakeholders. The director must be able to navigate competing demands, align technology work with strategic goals, and create a structured approach to digital system support and incremental enhancements.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategic Prioritization & Business Alignment

• Evaluate and prioritize incoming requests based on business impact, urgency, and technical feasibility.
• Set clear expectations with stakeholders, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.
• Communicate trade-offs transparently, advocating for business value over reactive task execution.
• Develop a structured framework for prioritization that ensures mission-critical support needs are met while also advancing small enhancements that drive continuous improvement.

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and empower a high-performing team responsible for support, defect resolution, and small system enhancements.
• Ensure cross-team collaboration, fostering a shared understanding of priorities, dependencies, and technical solutions.
• Create and uphold accountability structures to ensure work is completed efficiently and with high quality.
• Drive a culture of ownership, problem-solving, and continuous learning.
• Champion and personally drive the team's use of agentic AI tools to boost team creativity, efficiency, and skill development.

Operational Excellence & Process Improvement

• Establish and refine processes for managing digital defects, incidents, and enhancement requests, ensuring smooth workflows and minimal disruption.
• Improve and implement best practices for ticketing, resolution timelines, and stakeholder communication.
• Analyze trends in defects and enhancement requests to identify opportunities for proactive improvements and efficiency gains.
• Drive continuous innovation by incorporating emerging trends and tools, including agentic AI, into project workflows.

Technical & Business Understanding

• Serve as the bridge between technology teams and business stakeholders, ensuring both sides understand priorities, constraints, and impacts.
• Maintain a strong technical grasp of digital systems, workflows, and potential challenges, ensuring informed decision-making.
• Provide guidance on best practices for system stability, scalability, and continuous improvement.

Stakeholder Communication & Expectation Management

• Set firm but fair expectations with business stakeholders, ensuring they understand how and why prioritization decisions are made.
• Provide regular updates on progress, challenges, and key outcomes related to support and enhancements.
• Communicate realistic timelines, risks, and trade-offs when managing requests.

Qualifications:

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field.

Experience

• 6+ years of experience in IT leadership, with a focus on managing digital operations, technical support, and system enhancements.
• Proven track record of making strategic prioritization decisions that drive business value.
• Strong background in technical support, bug resolution, and application enhancement.
• Experience implementing agentic AI development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) and driving team-wide adoption in engineering workflows.

Skills & Competencies:

Technical & Business Expertise

• Strong understanding of digital applications, software development lifecycles, and IT support models.
• Ability to translate business needs into technical priorities and vice versa.
• Familiarity with modern ticketing systems (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps) and IT service management best practices.
• Hands-on proficiency with agentic AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex — not just chat-based AI assistants — to enhance development workflows.
• Fluency in prompt and context engineering — structuring instructions, memory, and tool access so an agent behaves reliably — and experience building reusable tooling (custom skills or commands, hooks, MCP integrations) around agentic coding assistants, not just ad hoc prompting.
• Understanding of the cost and reliability tradeoffs of agentic workflows at team scale — token usage, model selection, and when a task needs a human in the loop versus full autonomy.

Decision-Making & Prioritization

• Ability to assess competing priorities and make firm, strategic decisions.
• Skilled in identifying high-impact improvements while maintaining system stability.
• Experience in building structured prioritization frameworks for IT support and enhancement requests.

Leadership & Communication

• Strong people leadership skills, with the ability to motivate and guide teams in a fast-paced environment.
• Ability to set clear expectations and communicate priorities firmly yet diplomatically to stakeholders.
• Experience in negotiating and influencing senior leaders on digital priorities and trade-offs.
• Insists on verifying AI-generated work against real evidence — tests passing, logs, the actual deployed state — rather than accepting confident-sounding output at face value.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leading IT support and continuous improvement teams in a large enterprise environment.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), ITIL frameworks, and Agile methodologies.
• Strong understanding of metrics-driven decision-making and process optimization.
• Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification (or equivalent process-improvement credential) preferred.

Salary Range: $105,200 - $147,950

• Salary is commensurate to experience, location, etc.

Horace Mann was founded in 1945 by two Springfield, Illinois, teachers who saw a need for quality, affordable auto insurance for teachers. Since then, we’ve broadened our mission to helping all educators protect what they have today and prepare for a successful tomorrow. And with our broadened mission has come corporate growth: We serve more than 4,100 school districts nationwide, we’re publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol: HMN) and we have more than $12 billion in assets.

We’re motivated by the fact that educators take care of our children’s future, and we believe they deserve someone to look after theirs. We help educators identify their financial goals and develop plans to achieve them. This includes insurance to protect what they have today and financial products to help them prepare for their future. Our tailored offerings include special rates and benefits for educators.

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