HIH - Software Engineering Associate Director

Position Summary:

The Software Engineering Associate Director provides hands on leadership, management, and thought leadership for a Delivery organization enabling Cigna's Technology teams. This individual will lead a team based in our Hyderabad Innovation Hub to deliver innovative solutions supporting multiple business and technology domains within Cigna. This includes the Service Operations, Entities, Pharmacy business lines, as well as testing and DevOps enablement. The focus of the team is to build innovative solutions enabling business while modernizing our existing asset base to support business growth. The Technology strategy is aligned to our business strategy and the candidate will not only be able to influence technology direction but also establishing our team through recruiting and mentoring employees and vendor resources. This is a hands-on position with visibility to the highest levels of the Cigna Technology team. This leader will focus on enabling innovation using the latest technologies and development techniques. This role will foster rapidly building out a scalable delivery organization that aligns with all areas within the Technology team. The ideal candidate will be able to attract and develop talent in a highly dynamic environment.

Job Description & Responsibilities:

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  Provide leadership, vision, and design direction for the quality and development of the US Medical and Health Services Technology teams based at the Hyderabad Innovation Hub (HIH).

• Work in close coordination with leaders and teams based in the United States, as well as contractors employed by the US Medical and Health Services Technology team who are based both within and outside of the United States, to deliver products and capabilities in support of Cigna's business lines.

• Provide leadership to HIH leaders and teams ensuring the team is meeting the following objectives: Design, configuration, implementation application design/development, and quality engineering within the supported technologies and products.

• Hands-on people manager who has experience leading agile teams of highly talented technology professionals developing large solutions and internal facing applications. They are expected to work closely with developers, quality engineers, technical project managers, principal engineers, and business stakeholders to ensure that application solutions meet business/customer requirements.

• A servant leader mentality and a history of creating an inclusive environment, fostering diverse views and approaches from the team, and coaching and mentoring them to thrive in a dynamic workplace.

• A history of embracing and incubating emerging technology and open-source products.

• A passion for building highly resilient, scalable, and available platforms, rich reusable foundational capabilities and seamless developer experience while focusing on strategic vision and technology roadmap delivery in an MVP / iterative fast paced approach.

• Accountable for driving towards timely decisions while influencing across engineering and development delivery teams to drive towards meeting project timelines while balancing destination state.

• Ensure engineering solutions align with the Technology strategy and that they support the application’s requirements.

• Plan and implement procedures that will maximize engineering and operating efficiency for application integration technologies.

• Identify and drive process improvement opportunities.

• Proactive monitoring and management design of supported assets assuring performance, availability, security, and capacity.

• Maximize the efficiency (operational, performance, and cost) of the application assets.

Experience Required:

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  16 to 18 years of IT and business/industry or equivalent experience preferred, with at least 5 years of experience in a leadership role with responsibility for the delivery of large-scale projects and programs.

• Leadership, cross-cultural communication, and familiarity with wide range of technologies and stakeholders.

• Strong Emotional Intelligence with the ability to foster collaboration across geographically dispersed teams.

Experience Desired:

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  Recognized leader with proven track record of delivering software engineering initiatives and cross-IT/business initiatives.

• Proven experience leading/managing technical teams with a passion for developing talent within the team. Experience with vendor management in an onshore/offshore model.

• Experience in Healthcare, Pharmacy.

• Experience with AWS.

Education and Training Required:

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  B.S. degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or other related degrees;

• Industry certifications such as AWS Solution Architect, PMP, Scrum Master, or Six Sigma Green Belt are also ideal.

Primary Skills:

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  Familiarity with most of the following Application Development technologies: Python, RESTful services, React, Angular, Postgres, and MySQL (relational database management systems).

• Familiarity with most of the following Data Engineering technologies: Databricks, Spark, PySpark, SQL, Teradata, and multi-cloud environments.

• Familiarity with most of the following Cloud and Emerging technologies: AWS, LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic), vector databases (Pinecone, Milvus), graph databases (Neo4j, JanusGraph, Neptune), prompt engineering, and fine-tuning AI models.

• Familiarity with enterprise software development lifecycle to include production reviews and ticket resolution, navigating freeze/stability periods effectively, total cost of ownership reporting, and updating applications to align with evolving security and cloud standards.

• Familiarity with agile methodology including SCRUM team leadership or Scaled Agile (SAFE).

• Familiarity with modern delivery practices such as continuous integration, behavior/test driven development, and specification by example.

• Deep people and matrix management skills, with a heavy emphasis on coaching and mentoring of less senior staff, and a strong ability to influence VP level leaders.

• Proven ability to resolve issues and mitigate risks that could undermine the delivery of critical initiatives.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to interact with all levels of the organization.

• Strong influencing/negotiation skills.

• Strong interpersonal/relationship management skills.

• Strong time and project management skills.