Software Engineering Associate Director

About Evernorth:

Evernorth Health Services, a division of The Cigna Group (NYSE: CI), creates pharmacy, care, and benefits solutions to improve health and increase vitality. We relentlessly innovate to make the prediction, prevention, and treatment of illness and disease more accessible to millions of people.

Software Engineering Associate Director
Position Overview:

The Associate Director of Engineering will lead a team of front-line engineering leaders and advanced software engineers who design, modify, develop, implement, and support software products using agile engineering practices including object-oriented analysis & design, continuous integration/delivery, DevOps, and test-driven development. This role requires an agile advocate with adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, encouraging rapid and flexible response to change.

This role provides technical leadership to implement short and long-term strategies with their assigned teams for the Pharmacy+ organization, which deals with the complete life cycle of a prescription. Key products in the life cycle include Patient Access/Clearance, RxProcessing, Clinical operational usage, Call center enablement, Fulfillment and Back-end pharmacy Integration.

• Patient Access/ Clearance includes benefit services of prior authorization, insurance changes spanning pharmacy and medical benefits, and copay assistance.
• Coverage of benefits is critical for adjudication, ensuring Accredo will get paid for the prescriptions orchestrated across multiple payers.
• RxProcessing is used for prescription creation, reviewing the actual prescription image with the prescription created in the system, data verification, claim submission, performing Drug Usage Review (DUR), modifying the prescription dosage/days supply and authorize the prescription with pharmacist initials.
• Clinical is used by clinicians/Nurses to capture allergies, patient medication profile, assessment dates, clinical education etc.

The role requires transforming strategies into prioritized initiatives and responding to urgent issues in their specific function without losing focus on long-term deliverables. As a technical leader, this person must balance a wide range of initiatives and drive relationships with other technology leaders.

Essential Functions:

Directs a team of engineering Sr. Managers and Software Engineers who build high-performing scalable products that deliver business solutions while taking advantage of the latest technologies and practices. This includes object-oriented analysis & design, continuous integration/delivery, DevOps, and test-driven development. This role requires a leader to develop diverse and engaged teams that have the skills and drive to deliver performant, scalable technology products.

Areas of accountability include:

• Cultivating engaged and empowered engineering teams that are aligned around the core business and technology strategies for the pharmacy Clearance, RxP and Clinical operations; conveys business and technical strategic vision for the team.

Holistic ownership and accountability for technology products and delivery, including:

• Good end-to-end knowledge of product ecosystem, business transactions, system flow, architecture, upstream and downstream dependencies, and DevOps capabilities.
• Influencing partners at all levels of the organization to align future state business and technical road maps; ensuring future state architecture and road maps are complete, consistent, and feasible; defining business cases and influencing support for large, transformative technology investments.
• Complete understanding of total cost of ownership.
• Defining staffing strategy for the product domain in conjunction with state side partners, including budget planning;executing performance reviews and development plans for staff; recognizing technical and leadership development opportunities and addressing them through mentoring and other mechanisms.
• Delivering through team; using delegation effectively to ensure all domain obligations are met. This includes operating within allocated budget, and serving as an engineering technical champion to drive technical decisions. Able to tactically lead and mentor teams to resolve urgent and high production incidents.
• Collaborates cross-functionally within the technology organization as well as the business organization and applies knowledge of business and the marketplace to advance the organizations goals. This requires representing Technology in cross-functional meetings and projects.
• Develops strong matrix relationships with peer-partners, architects, engineering teams, product managers and quality engineering to operate efficiently and strategically in delivery of world-class solutions that are performant, scalable, reliable, resilient, and secure.
• Ensures applications are designed and constructed using solid engineering patterns.
• Encourages innovation and diversity of thought to solve complex business problems and removes impediments to achieve quality standards, project deadlines and business objectives.
• Advocates for emerging software engineering and agile best practices and methodologies.
• Promotes best practices across a variety of dimensions including common engineering patterns, efficiency, quality, resiliency, security, and performance. Has awareness of technology best practice trends being leveraged outside of the organization and brings them into the organization.
• Prepares, implements, and communicates new corporate initiatives and processes. Manages change effectively within the team and establishes a culture of continuous improvement within the teams by advocating for metrics.
• Has in-depth knowledge of tools and data available to measure agile and engineering maturity and efficiency, including mechanisms to drive improvement. Creates an environment of trust in which teams can "fail fast", developing the team in the process.
• Navigates cross-functionally and constructs strong relationships to resolve ongoing problems impacting product reliability.
• Has the technical expertise and presence to lead the troubleshooting conversation confidently yet is able to discern when it is appropriate to pivot between tactical and strategic tasks.
• Adapts approach and demeanor in real time to match the shifting demands of different situations.

Formal Education and / or Training:

• Bachelors degree in computer science or related field desired

Years of Experience:

• 16+ years relevant experience; Prior leadership experience leading front-line managers and senior individual contributors. 10+ years of experience building software applications, including hands-on coding experience; experience working with agile engineering methodologies.

Travel Requirements:

• Approximately up to 5% travel internationally to other US sites and team locations. Travel accommodations will adhere with corporate travel policies.

Computer or Other Skills:

• Experience designing software applications; clear understanding of concepts like Web Services, SOA, REST APIs, UX etc.
• Demonstrated knowledge of common engineering patterns and ability to confidently discuss benefits and rationales for usage.
• Background with Cloud platform concepts, and other emerging technologies such as Machine Learning/AL are a plus.

Knowledge and Abilities:

• Demonstrated record of leading a team of software engineers and cultivating high-performing teams
• Experience leading Platform Teams, involved with building reusable components used by multiple tenants and products.
• Demonstrated record of setting strategy and vision for a team of software engineers
• Demonstrated skill in building strong productive cross-functional relationships
• Complete understanding and wide application of software design techniques and agile engineering best practices
• Experience driving technical solutions that achieve business solutions
• Excellent communication skills both written and spoken
• Ability to provide technical solutions to a wide range of difficult problems; solutions are innovative, thorough, practical and consistent with organizational objectives
• Ability to adapt in a dynamic agile work environment and make decisions independently

Equal Opportunity Statement:

Evernorth is an Equal Opportunity Employer actively encouraging and supporting organization-wide involvement of staff in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to educate, inform and advance both internal practices and external work with diverse client populations.