Director of Research and Development

Valsoft Corporation • Ashburn, VA

9d

About The Position

We're looking for a Director of Research & Development to lead the modernization and expansion of our software products for the alternative financial services industry. This is a hands-on leadership role that merges software engineering expertise with forward-thinking AI integration and rapid product innovation. As Director of R&D, you will manage a talented engineering team and collaborate closely with our Product Manager and Operations teams. You’ll take ownership of delivering modern, scalable software—while embedding cutting-edge AI technologies into our workflows, user experience, and development process.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience leading software engineering or R&D teams, ideally in SaaS or fintech environments.
• Proven success delivering production-ready, customer-facing software across the full stack—from backend services to web frontends.
• Strong architectural skills and comfort with modern cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and DevOps workflows.
• Experience applying AI or automation tools to enhance product features or streamline development workflows.
• Familiarity with emerging AI/LLM frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) and enthusiasm for exploring how they can support product innovation.
• A track record of rapid iteration: launching prototypes quickly, gathering feedback, and refining based on real-world use.
• A leadership style grounded in mentorship, collaboration, and elevating team performance.
• Strong communication and project management skills—able to align cross-functional stakeholders and keep teams focused

Nice To Haves

• Experience revamping or re-platforming legacy systems into modern microservice or serverless architectures.
• Understanding of compliance and regulatory demands in financial software or MSBs .
• Background in intelligent automation, ML ops, or AI infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Full-Stack Leadership Take technical ownership across the entire stack: APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, frontend apps, and internal tools. Promote best practices in testing, observability, documentation , and code quality . Ensure platform reliability and performance across services, products, and AI components.
• Team Management & Mentorship Lead and grow a cross-functional engineering team with a strong culture of innovation, delivery, and continuous learning. Mentor developers in AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor) and encourage experimentation to increase team productivity. Support individual and team performance through feedback, pairing, code reviews, and professional development.
• AI-Driven Innovation & Product Development Design, build, and deploy AI-powered features across the platform—including agent-based workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), predictive tools, and automated decision systems. Drive the rapid prototyping of new features, turning ideas into working proof-of-concepts in days and production-ready tools in weeks. Apply LLMs and AI orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex) to real-world problems like compliance automation, document analysis, and fraud prevention. Lead platform modernization by refactoring legacy components and building scalable cloud-native services.
• Cross-Functional Execution Work in close partnership with Product Management and Operations to align development work with customer needs and business priorities. Communicate technical vision and architectural decisions across departments. Bring a pragmatic approach to balancing innovation, speed, and technical debt

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed