Development Director - $100,000 - $160,000/DOE - Missoula, Montana
About The Position
ELM Utility Services is an EEO Employer - M/F/Disability/Protected Veteran Status ELM Utility Services, with a team of over 1300 employees nationwide, is offering a great opportunity for a Development Director in the Missoula, Montana area. This position can be offered as a remote position to the right candidate pending interview. This is a technical leadership role—focused on architecture, engineering standards, code quality, and mentoring developers. You will work closely with IT leadership and stakeholders to ensure the team builds reliable, secure, maintainable systems that support operations at scale. ELM builds and maintains internal and customer-facing applications across a modern Microsoft stack and JavaScript/TypeScript-based front-end and mobile development. We’re looking for a technical leader with strong engineering judgment who can set direction, raise standards, and stay close to implementation—reviewing code, guiding architecture decisions, and unblocking developers. Our environment includes JavaScript, React Native (Expo) for mobile, C#, SQL Server/T-SQL, Python, and Microsoft Azure.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated technical leadership (lead engineer, principal engineer, architect, or hands-on engineering manager)
- Proven experience building and operating production systems (mobile/web applications, APIs/services, data-backed systems)
- Strong JavaScript/TypeScript fundamentals and experience setting standards across a codebase (tooling, packages, testing, conventions)
- React Native + Expo (or strong React/web experience with ability to lead mobile practices)
- Experience designing and integrating RESTful in C#
- SQL Server and T-SQL competence (schemas, stored procs, performance fundamentals)
- Azure experience (App Services, Azure SQL, auth/integration patterns)
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing strategy, code quality, secure development practices
- Frontend testing frameworks (Jest, React Testing Library, Detox for RN, etc.) and mobile release pipelines
- Experience with ETL/data workflows and performance tuning
Nice To Haves
- Familiarity with GIS-related systems or spatial data concepts (helpful in our domain)
Responsibilities
- Own technical direction for application development: architecture patterns, service boundaries, integration approaches, and engineering standards
- Lead design reviews and establish practical patterns for reliability, performance, and secure development
- Define and maintain engineering quality bars: testing expectations, code review practices, CI/CD standards, and release readiness
- Support UI engineering standards: reusable components, accessibility basics, performance profiling, and user-centric error handling
- Establish patterns for API consumption in JS/TS apps (typed clients, error/retry strategy, telemetry hooks)
- Oversee backend/API practices (service design, auth patterns, versioning, observability) and ensure the JS/TS layer integrates cleanly
- Ensure strong SQL Server practices: query quality, stored procedures, schema changes, and performance fundamentals
- Partner with data/analytics and operations teams to ensure backend capabilities support operational workflows and reporting needs
- Drive best practices for deploying and operating services in Microsoft Azure (App Services, Azure SQL, identity/integration patterns)
- Establish/maintain CI/CD standards (Azure DevOps or equivalent): build/release pipelines, environment promotion, rollback discipline, secrets management
- Improve operational readiness: logging, monitoring, alerting, incident response handoffs, post-incident improvements
- Mentor and grow developers through coaching, pairing, code review, and technical training
- Create an engineering culture of clarity, quality, and ownership with a bias toward pragmatic execution
- Support technical hiring and participate in architecture and senior-level technical interviews
Benefits
- Optional benefits like Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, Disability, FSA, H.S.A., and Teledoc.
- Company Paid Life Insurance
- Paid-Time Off (PTO) for vacation and sick time (Accrues up to 80 hours per full year and increases with years of service.)
- 6 Paid Holidays
- 401(k) plan
- Bonuses for milestone anniversaries
- Competitive pay based on experience
- Long history of stable employment and promoting from within
- Opportunity to lead and modernize production systems with meaningful operational impact
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
