IT Application Manager

Our client has an immediate opening for IT Application Manager to join their team in Toronto on 3-6 months contract – to hire position.

As an IT Application Manager, you will contribute to the products company creates, help grow the next generation of talent, and help build new technology solutions for the enterprise. This position oversees and directs several teams of associates in the development, implementation and ongoing support of existing and new software applications. You will work closely with end-user groups to ensure operational stability and that new applications meet the practical needs of the organization.

Key Responsibilities:

Strategy & Planning:

• Contributes to and make recommendations for strategic plans in support of key objectives in a timely and fiscally responsible manner
• Support and nurture strategic vendor relationships; recommend ways to influence vendors that align to domain, portfolio, and enterprise strategic objectives
• Thought Leadership - Evaluate new technologies for adoption across the enterprise
• Help to identify and demonstrate emerging technologies for adoption by product teams

Delivery & Execution:

• Owns and manages key functional areas and tracks the progress of multiple projects on the various portfolios.
• Collaborates and partners with other teams to create secure, robust, reliable, scalable software solutions
• Partner with Business and technology teams to build Functional and Technology roadmap projects using agile scrum methodology
• Documents, reviews and ensures that all quality and change control standards are met
• Project management and administration that include work plans, projects, resource planning, status reports, and preparing annual budgets.
• Works with vendors and partners for the successful implementation of applications and platforms
• Responsible to build dashboards, logging, alerting, and responses to ensure that issues are captured and addressed proactively
• Resolves information services problems by analyzing issues, discerning the most appropriate courses of action, providing tactical direction and, when necessary, re-allocating resources
• Communicates status of activities with the senior management, business partners, peers and end users.
• Develop a comprehensive journey map of Store Operations and propose a future-state application platform centered around modern applications and deliver a prioritized roadmap for legacy application decommissioning.

Support & Enablement:

• Responds to questions/inquiries from Business stakeholders, Technology team members, product teams, or support teams, ensuring clear communication and alignment across all groups.
• Monitors tools and participates in conversations to encourage collaboration across product teams
• Learns through reading, tutorials, videos, and other mediums on new technologies and best practices being used within other technology organizations
• Provides application support for software running in production.

People Leadership:

• Provides leadership, mentoring, and coaching to team members and other technology associates
• Attracts, retains, and develops top talent to build a world class software engineering team
• Build high performance technology teams. hire, develop, motivate and retain high potential technical resources.
• Conduct 1:1 meetings with Associates.
• Conducts Regular PACE/performance reviews, including reviewing individual development plans
• Fosters collaboration with team members to drive consistency across product teams, and finds opportunities to expose associates to career interests
• Guides team members in strategy, alignment, analysis, and execution tasks within and across cross functional teams
• Participates in and contributes to learning activities around modern software design and development core practices (communities of practice)

Skills:

• Excellent organizational and large-scale projects management skills.
• Excellent communication skills, including, presentation, facilitation and writing skills.
• Excellent stakeholders and vendor management skills.
• Strong business and financial analysis skills
• Experience with project delivery for large, cross-functional projects with large-scale systems of world-class availability, scalability, and performance requirements.
• Experience in operating autonomously across multiple teams, demonstrated critical thinking
• Proficient in hiring, managing and growing team members in a professional setting
• Proficient in prioritizing and balancing workloads across multiple team member
• Experience in conducting regular performance evaluations and provide feedback.

Minimum Education:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.

Minimum Years of Work Experience:

• 6-8 Years of Relevant Work Experience, including experience managing cross functional software development initiatives

Minimum Leadership Experience:

• 3 - 5 years Relevant experience leading large teams

Other Requirements/Assets:

• Exposure to Retail and HR applications an asset.
• Exposure to onboarding SaaS platforms will be considered an asset.
• Experience with SQL, SAP, Cloud technologies, Micro services, CI/CD, web technologies (e.g., Java, spring, spring boot, angular, Ruby, React etc) & SOA/distributed applications architectures.
• Previous experience with the modernization of legacy systems, particularly working on 4ge and Informix server upgrades, is considered a valuable asset.
• Experience operating independently across multiple teams, demonstrated critical thinking
• Experience establishing work relationships across multi-disciplinary teams and drive results with multiple partners in different time zones.
• Highly preferred technology experience of applications in any big box retail organization.
• Software development background is preferred.
• Experience working with senior leaders to drive business decisions and deliver projects
• Previous experience defining SLAs and performance matrix for the team and regularly monitoring and mentoring them to achieve those with high quality standards.