Director of Automation & Engineering

Oklahoma State Government • Oklahoma City, OK

2d • Onsite

About The Position

As the Director of Automation & Engineering with OMES you will enjoy: Generous leave including 15 days of vacation, 15 days of sick leave and 11 paid holidays annually. A comprehensive Benefit Package with a generous benefit allowance to offset the cost of insurance premiums for employees and their eligible dependents. Job Details Full-time 40-hour work weeks. Support the Information Services Division. Salary is based on education and experience. Position is on-site in Oklahoma City, OK. Position Summary The Director of Automation & Engineering is a key leader responsible for transforming the application delivery function across agencies within the State of Oklahoma. Reporting to the State Chief AI & Technology Officer, this role focuses on process improvement across agencies, accelerating modern engineering discipline, and transitioning enterprise technology teams toward product-oriented and platform-driven delivery. Through implementing intelligent automation solutions, the Director of Automation & Engineering aims to streamline business processes, reduce manual workload, and enhance operational efficiency while enabling digital experience, fostering delivery excellence, and accelerating technology modernization across State IT and partner agencies.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in application development, software engineering, or technology leadership roles
• 5+ years leading cross-functional engineering or application teams, ideally across both legacy and modern stacks

Nice To Haves

• Current certification in Six Sigma, Lean Agile, or the equivalent
• Experience working in or alongside government or large matrixed organizations
• Demonstrate ability to lead software engineering teams through large-scale transformation and recovery
• Ability to blend Agile, product, and platform practices with government constraints and legacy systems
• Familiarity with DevOps, CI/CD, API-based architectures, and Agile-at-scale models
• Executive presence with comfort engaging across business, technical, and public-sector leadership
• Commitment to public service, transparency, and measurable impact
• Proven experience leading large teams, including a mix of FTEs, contractors, and vendor resources

Responsibilities

• Intelligent Automation Leads the design and implementation of intelligent automation solutions for process improvement across operations and technology domains, leveraging modern automation tooling (ie, PowerPlatform, UIPath, and or similar enterprise solutions)
• Identifies high-value automation opportunities to reduce manual work, cycle times, and errors across development, operations, and cloud environments.
• Ensure seamless integration of robotic processing automation (RPA) and other automation capabilities across existing technology platforms and IT infrastructure, promoting a unified and scalable environment.
• Leverage AI and machine learning to enhance decision-making capabilities and drive reduction of cycle times and other operational efficiency gains
• Uses metrics and telemetry to identify stability and performance issues, and partners with teams to design and implement improvements.
• Application Modernization Partner with business and enterprise technology teams to assess and manage the enterprise application portfolio, aligning delivery with Agency mission value, enterprise fit, and modernization readiness
• Collaborate with business and enterprise technology teams to evaluate technical health, lifecycle posture, and rationalization opportunities to enable longer term modernization of legacy applications into cloud-native or hybrid cloud environments
• Support readiness assessments of current applications, identifying rehosting, re-platforming, or refactoring opportunities
• Ensure application teams adopt modern cloud design patterns, including containerization, APIs, and infrastructure-as-code
• Drive alignment between cloud modernization initiatives and broader enterprise digital strategy, prioritizing resiliency, scalability, and cost efficiency
• Platform & Developer Experience Provides reusable reference architectures and shared components, enabling application services teams to adopt proven patterns instead of rebuilding common solutions.
• Engages with application and data engineering teams to gather feedback and continuously improve the developer experience, tools, and standards.
• Establishes and maintains engineering standards for state-supported applications, including branching strategies, code review practices, testing expectations, documentation, and observability requirements.
• Designs, develops, and manages an internal developer platform, including golden templates, starter repositories, standard pipelines, and self-service capabilities for teams and agencies.
• Provides coaching, guidance, and technical leadership to state staff and vendor teams on modern engineering practices, automation, and platform usage.
• Customer Partnership & Technology Delivery Oversee the end-to-end delivery of application development across legacy and modern systems for assigned stakeholder groups and selected strategic initiatives
• Nurture relationships with agency partners through direct engagement, improved intake visibility, and consistent status reporting
• Establish and enforce delivery standards that support both waterfall and Agile/hybrid project models.
• Introduce foundational controls for work intake, estimation, resource planning, and milestone accountability
• Oversee day-to-day operations, team capacity, work planning, and employee engagement
• Collaborates with vendors and partners to resolve technical issues, promote best practices, and ensure commitments to quality and reliability are met.

Benefits

• Generous leave including 15 days of vacation, 15 days of sick leave and 11 paid holidays annually.
• A comprehensive Benefit Package with a generous benefit allowance to offset the cost of insurance premiums for employees and their eligible dependents.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 101-250 employees