Software Engineer Lead - Innovation
Herndon, VA

Job Description

Volkswagen Group of America (VWGoA) is the parent company of Audi, Volkswagen, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, and Volkswagen Credit, Inc. (VCI) in the US. As the financial arm of Audi, Volkswagen and Ducati, VCI focuses on providing financing and insurance products for people who lease or finance cars, and digitally engaging customers post-purchase.

Recently, as part of Volkswagen AG's "Route 2025" strategy large investments are being made globally towards the group becoming the industry leader in Mobility (mobility is a broad term capturing new business models and technologies like car subscriptions, car sharing autonomous vehicles, etc.).

The Volkswagen Credit (VCI) innovation Lab is committed to the fundamental principle that the most imaginative work comes from a unique "antidisciplinary" culture advanced by a dedicated group of passionate innovators. The innovation team is a small dedicated team exploring the application of FinTech and business innovations in a controlled environment. We work with our VCI colleagues, brand partners and other VW Group innovation teams to cultivate promising ideas into opportunities. We partner with industry leaders, startups and universities to make our ideas come to life in POCs and prototypes.

The Lead Software Engineer - Innovation Software Engineer - Full Stack will lead, design, own the creation and utilization of VCI's entire innovation pilot tech stack, and build our prototypes and proof of concept applications. This is a new role on a new team so this lead engineer will have the opportunity to create the team and the technical design and development of cross-functional, multi-platform prototypes and POCs. We are looking for an energetic, and entrepreneurial engineer who has successfully imagined, built and launched prototypes, POCs and pilots in a startup or at a big company. To fit in, you have to be jazzed about delivering amazingly simple experiences that will redefine people's relationship with cars or financial institutions.

Position Responsibilities

* Educate and inform yourself and team members about technology opportunities


* Continually participate in visioning exercises and help guide the innovation strategy for VCI


* Identify opportunities to use new technologies in the business together with the different business divisions ("pull innovation approach")


* Integrate state-of-the-art ideas and developments into POCs, prototypes and pilots


* Identify, evaluate and refine leading-edge tools and methods


* Create and define tech stack for POCs, prototypes and pilots


* Build prototypes and POCs


* Manage the team of engineers that will be implementing the creation of the applications


* Create a technical platform strategy for VCI's new product innovation work


* Own the technical design and development of cross-functional, multi-platform applications


* Encourage innovation, implementation of cutting-edge technologies, inclusion, outside-of-the-box thinking, teamwork, self-organization, and diversity


* Work within and across Agile teams to design, develop, test, implement, and support technical solutions across a full-stack of development tools and technologies


* Work with business partners, architects, and other groups to identify technical and functional needs of systems, and determine priority of needs


* Bring a passion to stay on top of tech trends, experiment with and learn new technologies, participate in internal & external technology communities, and mentor other members of the engineering community


* Ensure adherence to defined development life cycle, good software design practices, and Architecture strategy and intent


* Coordinate coding, testing, implementation and documentation of solutions



Required Education:

Master's Degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Required Experience:

10 years of experience

Required Skills:

* 7 years of full life-cycle experience (including design, development, unit testing, debugging, etc.) in the delivery of a wide variety of enterprise software solutions.


* 5 years of experience with agile methodologies


* 5 years of experience in people management


* 5 years of experience in building Java or .Net applications


* 5 years of experience using UI technologies like HTML, CSS, and AngularJS


* 3 years of experience in solution architecture


* 3 years of experience in cloud architectures (public and private)


* 3 years of experience with Spring, Spring Boot, Hibernate, steeltoe frameworke


* 5 years of experience in delivering production ready software


* 5 years of experience with RESTful API's and API lifecycles



Required Specialized Skills:

* Expertise in building twelve-factor apps


* Knowledge of Relational Databases and database applications



Desired Specialized Skills:

* Experience with one or more agile development methodologies


* Cloud Foundry (or commercial equivalent) experience



Work Flexibility:

This role will be based in Herndon, VA with a 25% travel expectation.

We are proud to be an EEO employer M/F/D/V. We maintain a drug-free workplace and perform pre-employment substance abuse testing.

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