Technology Manager - Customer Web & Mobile Platforms

American Electric Power•Columbus, OH

4d•Onsite

About The Position

The Technology Manager, Customer Digital Platforms is responsible for the strategic direction, delivery, and operational excellence of AEP's customer-facing digital platforms, including web applications, mobile applications, chat solutions, and conversational customer engagement capabilities. This leader will manage the teams responsible for delivering innovative digital experiences while ensuring the reliability, security, availability, and performance of mission-critical customer platforms. The role is accountable for both Build and Operate responsibilities, leading delivery of the product roadmap while maintaining operational ownership of Tier 1 customer-facing applications. This includes oversight of application development, production operations, incident management, service restoration, system reliability, operational readiness, and continuous improvement of the customer experience. The Technology Manager serves as a strategic partner to business stakeholders, helping shape digital strategy, prioritize investments, and deliver technology solutions that improve customer experience and business outcomes. This leader will champion the evolution of software engineering practices through adoption of AI-enabled and agentic software development capabilities, improving engineering productivity, software quality, testing effectiveness, operational support, and speed of delivery. Managing a blended organization of more than 30 employees and contractors, the Technology Manager will work closely with business partners, architecture, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and vendor organizations to ensure successful delivery and operation of AEP's customer digital platforms.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, business, or related technical field is required.
An equivalent combination of education and related experience may be considered.
8 or more years of technology experience
4-6 years of direct supervision experience preferred.
Customer-facing web and mobile application platforms
Chat and conversational experience technologies
API and integration architectures
Cloud-native application platforms
DevSecOps and CI/CD practices
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and operational excellence principles
Observability, monitoring, and automation platforms
AI-enabled software engineering and agentic development concepts

Responsibilities

Lead the engineering teams responsible for AEP's customer-facing web, mobile, chat, and conversational platforms.
Own delivery of the technology roadmap for customer digital platforms.
Partner with business and technology stakeholders to prioritize and deliver strategic digital capabilities.
Ensure solutions are secure, scalable, resilient, and aligned with enterprise technology standards.
Establish performance metrics focused on customer experience, platform reliability, engineering effectiveness, and business value delivery.
Serve as a trusted technology partner to Customer Care Operations and other business leadership, collaborating to define roadmaps, priorities, success measures, and technology strategies that advance AEP's customer digital capabilities.
Translate business strategy, customer needs, and operational objectives into actionable technology plans and engineering outcomes.
Communicate portfolio health, delivery commitments, operational performance, risks, and dependencies to business and technology leaders.
Facilitate prioritization and tradeoff decisions that balance customer value, operational stability, regulatory requirements, technology modernization, and investment objectives.
Partner with Architecture, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Data & Analytics, and other technology organizations to deliver integrated solutions that support customer and business objectives.
Advocate for customer-centric thinking and ensure customer experience considerations are embedded throughout the product lifecycle.
Lead the adoption of AI-enabled and agentic software development practices across engineering teams.
Drive continuous improvement of requirements management, design, development, testing, deployment, documentation, and support processes through emerging AI capabilities.
Establish governance, standards, and best practices for responsible and secure use of generative AI technologies throughout the software development lifecycle.
Evaluate new technologies and identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity, quality, delivery predictability, and operational efficiency.
Foster a culture of innovation, experimentation, continuous learning, and engineering excellence.
Define and implement an AI-enabled software engineering strategy that modernizes the software development lifecycle while maintaining security, compliance, quality, and operational standards.
Maintain end-to-end accountability for customer digital platforms from concept through production operations.
Ensure Tier 1 customer-facing systems achieve established objectives for availability, reliability, performance, recoverability, and security.
Lead Level 3 production support activities, incident response, service restoration, root cause analysis, and problem management efforts.
Drive operational excellence through adoption of observability, automation, resiliency, DevSecOps, and proactive monitoring capabilities.
Establish scalable support models and operational processes that support future organizational and platform growth.
Ensure technology services are delivered safely, efficiently, and in alignment with business expectations and operational commitments.
Lead, develop, and retain a high-performing technology organization of more than 30 employees and contractors supporting AEP's customer digital platforms.
Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, inclusion, innovation, and continuous improvement.
Support recruitment, coaching, workforce planning, succession planning, and professional development activities.
Manage project budgets, operational expenditures, technology investments, and resource allocation.
Establish and manage strategic vendor and partner relationships, ensuring delivery of expected outcomes and value.
Balance investments across innovation, technical debt reduction, operational excellence, and roadmap commitments.
Promote safety, compliance, risk management, and adherence to enterprise technology standards and policies.