Director, Software Engineering (Digital Engagement)

About Aqua

Aqua Finance (Aqua) delivers flexible, consumer-friendly financing programs that help families across the U.S. bring their goals to life. From clean water solutions and home improvements to outdoor adventures, our financing options help make life’s essentials and experiences more affordable.

We’re a growing national company with values deeply rooted in our Midwestern culture — one that genuinely cares about you as an individual. We succeed when you succeed and celebrate the unique skills, perspectives, and experiences you bring to our team.

At Aqua, we say “Yes!” — to helping you succeed, to your growth, and to creating a place where you can thrive.

The Opportunity

The Director, Software Engineering, provides strategic and operational leadership for software engineering teams and the managers who lead them. This role is accountable for translating business priorities into an executable engineering strategy, delivering reliable and scalable technology solutions, and building a strong culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement. The Director owns senior-level relationships with assigned business units, serving as a trusted technology partner who understands their goals, anticipates needs, shapes priorities, and ensures engineering investments produce meaningful business outcomes. Through a visible and credible leadership presence, the Director aligns leaders and teams, influences enterprise decisions, communicates clearly through ambiguity, and establishes confidence with executives, business partners, and technical stakeholders. 

What You’ll Do

• Lead, coach, and develop software engineering managers and technical leaders, establishing clear expectations, strengthening leadership capability, and building succession plans and a sustainable talent pipeline. 

• Own strategic relationships with assigned business units, creating a regular partnership cadence to understand business strategy, identify technology needs, shape roadmaps, resolve competing priorities, and maintain shared accountability for outcomes. 

• Establish a strong leadership presence across Technology and the broader organization by communicating a clear point of view, making timely decisions, navigating difficult conversations, and creating alignment among business, product, architecture, security, and engineering stakeholders. 

• Translate enterprise and business-unit priorities into a cohesive engineering strategy, multi-team roadmap, capacity plan, and delivery commitments that balance value, risk, quality, and long-term sustainability. 

• Provide portfolio-level oversight of software delivery, proactively identifying dependencies, resource constraints, delivery risks, and quality concerns, and ensuring leaders implement durable corrective actions. 

• Set and reinforce engineering standards for architecture, secure development, testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation, incident response, and operational readiness in partnership with architecture, security, infrastructure, and risk teams. 

• Ensure systems are reliable, secure, maintainable, and scalable, with disciplined practices for on-call support, production incident management, root-cause analysis, postmortems, and technical debt reduction. 

• Guide managers and teams in critically evaluating estimates, technical designs, vendor solutions, and proposed approaches, ensuring decisions are grounded in business value, sound engineering judgment, and the simplest effective solution. 

• Define and monitor portfolio-level measures for delivery, quality, reliability, team health, and business outcomes; use data, retrospectives, and stakeholder feedback to improve performance and transparency. 

• Partner with Product Management and business leaders to strengthen intake, prioritization, and planning practices, ensuring commitments are realistic, tradeoffs are explicit, and progress, risks, and decisions are communicated early. 

• Develop workforce, sourcing, and organizational plans that align engineering capacity and capabilities with current and future priorities, including hiring, internal development, contractor strategy, and vendor partnerships. 

• Promote the responsible use of AI-assisted engineering tools and emerging technologies to improve productivity, software quality, and decision-making while aligning with company governance, security, and risk expectations. 

• Contribute to technology strategy, annual planning, budget management, operating rhythms, and enterprise initiatives; represent Software Engineering in cross-functional leadership forums as needed. 

• Foster an inclusive, accountable, and connected culture across distributed teams, with strong communication practices, collaboration, recognition, and continuous learning. 

What You’ll Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or commensurate work experience required  

• 10 years of experience professional software development experience in progressively elevated roles required 

• 5 years of management experience in a technical field required 

• Experience with .Net/C# preferred 

• Proven track record of delivering complex software projects with distributed or remote teams. 

• Experience across the full software development lifecycle, including design, testing, deployment, and operations. 

• Financial industry experience preferred. 

• Demonstrated ability to analyze problems to their root cause and to constructively challenge estimates, designs, and technical approaches. 

• Strong knowledge of solution architecture, secure coding practices, software design principles, system integration, scalability, reliability, and cloud-hosted application development using Microsoft Azure, AWS, or GCP. 

• Familiarity with modern engineering practices such as CI/CD and agile methodologies, and with AI-assisted development tools. 

• Demonstrated ability to coach, give constructive feedback, and grow engineers at different levels. 

• Strong product and business mindset, with a focus on the outcomes the technology delivers.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including strong asynchronous communication habits. 

The Aqua Advantage

At Aqua, we’re committed to supporting you both at work and beyond. Our benefits, programs, and perks are designed to support your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Paid Time Off — Paid time off (PTO), paid holidays, and floating holidays to support time away from work.
• Health & Insurance — Medical, dental, vision, and additional coverage options.
• Retirement Savings — Company-matched 401(k) plan to help you invest in your future.
• Professional Development — Training, career growth, and educational opportunities to support your development.
• Work-Life Balance — An emphasis on flexibility and support both inside and outside of work.
• Inclusive Culture & Community Support — Diversity and inclusion initiatives along with paid volunteer opportunities.

What to Expect

This is primarily an office-based role that requires regular use of a computer and the ability to sit for extended periods. While performing the responsibilities of this position, employees may frequently be required to sit, stand, walk, communicate verbally, hear, use vision, and handle or operate office equipment.

The employee may occasionally be required to lift, push, or pull up to 20 pounds.