The Manager, Software Services is a strategic technology leader who is responsible for our software portfolio and leads a team of developers maintaining and modernizing ATSG's software solutions and building new custom applications for the business. This team supports mission-critical, regulated operations, including airline and aviation-maintenance organizations, where reliability, security, and compliance are non-negotiable.
This role sets technical strategy, prioritizes across competing demands, builds the team's processes and standards, and guides the modernization of a significant legacy footprint while standing up new capabilities on emerging platforms (Microsoft Fabric, Rayfin, and AI-assisted development). At the same time, this person must be technically credible and willing to go hands-on when the situation calls for it during critical outages, complex design decisions, or when mentoring the team through unfamiliar problems. The ideal candidate leads primarily through vision, judgment, and enablement, and drops into the code when it matters most.
This role applies systems thinking to understand relationships among applications, integrations, data flows, infrastructure, business processes, and vendor platforms, ensuring technology decisions support long-term enterprise objectives rather than individual systems alone.
Core Responsibilities- Lead and direct a team of developers, analysts, and technical contributors in maintaining, supporting, and enhancing software solutions for mission-critical, regulated business operations.
- Lead and direct third-party vendors ensuring work is done on time in accordance with statements of work. As well as creating statements of work to ensure that Air Transport Services Group, Inc. priorities are met. Own vendor performance, contract deliverables, service quality, technical direction, and value realization from outsourced development and support engagements.
- Set technical strategy and direction across .NET development, Power Apps, and custom application delivery guiding design and architecture decisions rather than owning day-to-day implementation.
- Work with other IT verticals, including the data platform team, to direct adoption of new platforms and technologies like Microsoft Fabric, Rayfin, and AI-assisted coding tools and shape how they fit the team's delivery model.
- Develop the team's processes, procedures, and standards (intake, code review, secure SDLC, release, and support) where they don't yet exist, and direct the creation of new tooling to improve delivery and reduce manual effort.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership when needed stepping into critical outages, high-stakes design decisions, and complex troubleshooting.
- Partner with business stakeholders, IT leadership, vendors, infrastructure, security, data platform, and subsidiary teams to translate needs into supportable solutions.
- Ensure solutions meet regulatory, logging, monitoring, error-handling, documentation, and deployment standards.
- Coach and mentor the team, drive cross-training, and eliminate single points of failure. Balancing team skill improvement with current workloads.
- Create and manage an application and project intake process that prioritizes business value, technical debt, supportability, security, risk, and modernization priorities.
- Maintain visibility into the application portfolio, balancing business value, technical debt, supportability, security, risk, and modernization priorities.
- Establish and monitor operational metrics related to application health, support performance, modernization progress, delivery effectiveness, and service reliability.
- Apply systems thinking to evaluate cross-functional impacts, dependencies, and long-term operational consequences of technology decisions.
- Contribute to budgeting, resource forecasting, vendor contract oversight, and technology investment planning
Required Job Skills- Bachelor's in IT, Computer Science, or related field, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years in application development, software engineering, integration, or software support.
- 5+ years leading developers, technical teams, or major initiatives, with a track record of leading through strategy and delegation rather than personal execution alone.
- Strong technical foundation with the ability to go hands-on when needed-able to review and correct work from both developers and AI tools, and to lead by example in critical moments.
- Background in C#/.NET development and building custom business applications.
- Experience modernizing legacy applications, interfaces, and integrations.
- Strong SDLC, relational database/SQL, SQL Server and Oracle Databases, and integration experience (APIs, file transfers, data feeds, middleware, ETL/ELT-style processes).
- Proven ability to work in a high ambiguity environment and build processes, standards, and tooling where little structure exists.
- Ability to troubleshoot complex issues across applications, data, vendors, and infrastructure.
- Strong communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders, and the ability to manage competing priorities under operational pressure.
- Vendor management, including statements of work, contract deliverables, and vendor performance.
- Experience evaluating technology decisions from both a system-level and business process perspective
Preferred Job Skills- Experience with cloud platforms (Microsoft Fabric / Azure preferred), cloud-native architecture patterns, and modern application hosting models.
- Experience with REST APIs, Python, Power Apps and Windows services.
- Experience with reporting/analytics tools (Power BI, SSRS, SSAS) and event-driven or cloud architecture.
- Experience with file-based integrations and sFTP; message queues and middleware; Windows services and scheduled jobs; vendor enterprise systems and other relevant software experience.
- Experience in aviation, airline operations, maintenance, or other regulated, mission-critical environments.
- Familiarity handling regulated data (ITAR / EAR / CUI) and least-privilege access controls in a development context.
- Experience governing AI-assisted development (secure review, usage analytics, ROI, NIST AI RMF / SSDF alignment).
- Source control and CI/CD (GitHub, GitHub Copilot, Azure DevOps).
- Comfort with outcomes-based delivery Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid-applied pragmatically to the work rather than as rigid ceremony.
- Experience with production incident management, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
- Experience working in an AI-assisted development environment, including setting standards for reviewing AI-generated code.
- Experience with delta parquet, Couchbase, NoSQL, Graph databases or other data lake architectures, or other large-scale data platforms.
Leadership Expectations- Lead through strategy, vision, and enablement set direction and let the team execute, stepping in hands-on only when the situation demands it.
- Provide clear accountability; make visibility into work, risks, and blockers routine.
- Balance operational stability with modernization and new-technology adoption.
- Build repeatable processes and tooling so delivery doesn't depend on any one person.
- Set the standard for responsible AI use model when to trust, verify, or reject AI output.
- Foster ownership, reliability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Promote systems thinking across the team, ensuring technical decisions consider scalability, maintainability, security, operational dependencies, and long-term business impact.
- Align technology investments and delivery priorities with business outcomes, regulatory requirements, operational efficiency, and enterprise strategy.
