Director of Research and Development

Role Description

What You'll Own

• Platform & Product Engineering
  • Technical ownership of the Total Service Cloud ERP — TypeScript/Node, React, Express, Drizzle ORM on PostgreSQL, Vite, Vitest, Playwright — across features, backend correctness, and release engineering.
  • Functional parity between the legacy desktop ERP and the cloud platform: a module-by-module program across Payroll, AR, AP, GL, Job Cost, Inventory, Dispatch, Sales, Purchasing, Reporting, and Banking, audited and carried to release-verified.
  • The highest-stakes correctness work: general-ledger posting and reversals, payroll tax wage bases, US and Canadian tax handling, multi-tenant isolation, and permission enforcement.
  • ERP-wide UX standards — authoring the conventions and holding every module to them.
  • Continuity of the legacy systems that still serve customers, including a Java/Spring service layer and the VB6 desktop ERP.
• Cloud Infrastructure, Reliability & Cost Governance
  • Cloud architecture and operations across Azure and AWS for a multi-tenant customer fleet: App Service slots, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Key Vault, Front Door, managed identity, and infrastructure-as-code (Bicep).
  • Release and deploy infrastructure: CI/CD in GitHub Actions, blue-green UAT on refreshed masked databases, deploy gates, and slot-swap workflows.
  • Cloud cost governance — you own the spend, the forecast, and the optimization backlog. Recent work in this seat cut monthly Azure spend by roughly half.
  • Production incident response: error triage, root-cause analysis, fleet-wide architectural calls, and uptime accountability.
• Legacy-to-Cloud Migration
  • End-to-end ownership of the migration program: the canonical tenant matrix, the Python/SQL Server → PostgreSQL ETL pipeline, schema canonicalization, and data-fidelity reconciliation.
  • Customer production imports and go-lives, and final escalation ownership for migration data issues.
  • The decommissioning path for the legacy platform, coordinated with infrastructure and legacy-ERP peers.
• AI in the Software Lifecycle
  • Architecture and operation of our multi-agent development pipeline (ClickUp → Claude Code → GitHub PR), including the decisions that keep it auditable and the per-task economics that keep it affordable.
  • Accountable authorship for AI-assisted output — the pipeline accelerates the work; you own the result.
  • Supporting internal tooling: repo/task sync automation, AI-assisted QA triage, and developer tooling experiments.
  • Representing the business unit as a practitioner on AI in the SDLC, internally and to sister companies across the Constellation group.
• Leadership & Representation
  • Lead the engineering team: chair standups and technical syncs, author specs, split and review work, and act as merge and release gatekeeper.
  • Direct QA and contractor staffing and resourcing.
  • Run customer-facing onboarding and go-live directly for named accounts.
  • Report the business unit's R&D and AI initiatives upward to Jonas/Constellation, and participate in cross-business-unit technical forums.
  • Evaluate vendors and drive business-unit IT, security, and tenancy decisions.

Qualifications

• Senior full-stack engineering depth in TypeScript/Node (React, Express, an ORM against PostgreSQL) with demonstrated ownership of a production application at meaningful scale.
• Strong backend correctness discipline in financial or accounting domains — GL, AR/AP, payroll, or tax — and in multi-tenant SaaS security (authorization, tenant isolation).
• Substantial cloud engineering experience on Azure and/or AWS, including infrastructure-as-code, secrets and identity management, and cost optimization.
• Data migration and ETL experience: relational-to-relational at fleet scale, with schema canonicalization and reconciliation.
• DevOps and release engineering: CI/CD, blue-green or slot-based deployment, migration safety, and production incident response.
• Practical experience with LLM agents or AI-assisted development, and sound judgment about where to trust them and where not to.
• Technical leadership: leading engineers, setting standards, gatekeeping releases, and representing engineering to executives and customers.
• Comfort working with legacy code you did not write, and the pragmatism to keep it running while replacing it.

Preferred

• Field-service, elevator, door, or HVAC ERP domain experience.
• Experience inside the Jonas Software / Constellation operating model.
• Mobile release engineering (Android, Play Console, signing and keystore management, crash observability).
• Java or Java/Android maintenance experience.
• Enterprise identity and tenancy administration (Entra/SSO, Microsoft 365, email security tooling).
• .NET/C# familiarity for auxiliary services.

Our Stack

• Languages & frameworks: TypeScript/Node, React, Express, Drizzle ORM; Python; Java/Spring; Java/Android; VB6; PowerShell; some .NET/C#
• Data: PostgreSQL (Flexible Server), SQL Server, migration tooling
• Cloud: Azure (App Service slots, PostgreSQL, Key Vault, Bicep, Front Door, ACR, APIM, managed identity) and AWS (S3, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, QuickSight)
• AI & automation: Claude Code, multi-agent orchestration, MCP
• DevOps & observability: GitHub Actions, Sentry, PgBouncer, Docker, Playwright, Vitest
• Collaboration: ClickUp, Microsoft 365 / Teams, Tailscale