Director of Software Engineering

Higginbotham•Ridgeland, MS

About The Position

Fortress Affinity Management is Higginbotham's standalone affinity insurance platform — purpose-built to turn group relationships into scalable, recurring insurance programs. FAM provides the complete infrastructure needed to support these programs, including digital intake systems, member portals, and dedicated service teams, all aimed at reducing friction and improving results for both producers and their clients. The Director of Software Engineering leads day-to-day engineering execution for Fortress Affinity Management’s growing digital insurance platform. This player-coach owns delivery across software development, QA, and DevOps; establishes practical standards for architecture, code quality, security, and release reliability; and partners with business leaders to turn priorities into dependable outcomes. The role is designed for a technically credible leader who can guide a small, high-output team, review critical designs and pull requests, and improve the systems and practices that enable the team to scale. This is an opportunity to shape engineering practices and platform direction in a business where technology has a direct, visible effect on client and member experiences. The successful candidate will have meaningful ownership, close access to business decision-makers, and the ability to improve how a focused team designs, builds, and operates products—without the layers and narrow scope common in much larger technology organizations.

Requirements

Demonstrated success leading a small software engineering team through competing priorities, improving delivery predictability and technical quality, and developing engineers through clear expectations, feedback, and coaching.
Substantial software engineering experience, including several years of technical leadership with accountability for delivery and people management, required.
Experience with Agile delivery practices and Azure DevOps work item management.
Deep experience with modern application architecture, APIs, data access patterns, and relational databases is required.
Current or recent hands-on familiarity with the platform stack — C#, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, and SQL Server — is strongly preferred.
Azure DevOps experience across Boards, Repos, and Pipelines.
Microsoft Azure experience across application hosting, identity and secrets management, observability, security, and high-availability and disaster-recovery design; experience with App Service and Key Vault preferred.
Working knowledge of modern CI/CD, automated testing, production monitoring, and secure software delivery practices.

Nice To Haves

Experience building multi-tenant SaaS products or software in insurance, financial services, healthcare, or another regulated-data environment is a plus.
Experience evaluating and guiding the responsible use of AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar products.
Experience with Blazor is helpful but not required.
Familiarity with Cloudflare and AWS-based tooling is a plus.

Responsibilities

Translate business priorities into a clear engineering roadmap and achievable delivery plans across active and upcoming projects, balancing client commitments, technical risk, and team capacity.
Lead sprint planning, backlog prioritization, and delivery governance in Azure DevOps while improving predictability, visibility, and follow-through.
Set and uphold practical standards for architecture, code quality, security, data, testing, and operability; stay close enough to critical designs and pull requests to evaluate quality firsthand and coach the team effectively.
Partner with the product owner and business stakeholders to clarify priorities, shape requirements and acceptance criteria, and maintain a healthy backlog that reflects delivery capacity and business value — with product accountable for what is built and why, and engineering accountable for how it is built and when it lands.
Surface delivery, timeline, technical, and resourcing risks early, with clear options and recommendations for leadership.
Represent engineering in client-facing conversations about delivery commitments, dependencies, and technical trade-offs when needed.
Lead the performance, growth, workload, and engagement of the development, QA, and DevOps functions through clear expectations, regular feedback, coaching, and accountability.
Recruit, onboard, and develop engineering talent, building repeatable practices that help new hires contribute quickly and sustainably.
Establish and improve engineering operations across development, QA, and DevOps, including release discipline, service reliability, incident learning, security practices, and appropriate automation.
Evaluate and guide the responsible use of AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering speed and quality while protecting source code, customer data, security, and review standards.
Foster a culture of ownership, constructive challenge, quality, learning, and continuous improvement.