Head of Software Development – Center of Excellence Lead

PassportCard Labs is where innovation meets impact. As the technological powerhouse behind PassportCard, we design and build cutting-edge solutions that revolutionize the insurance industry. Whether it’s real-time claims payments or predictive analytics, our Labs team is at the forefront of driving change and shaping the future of insurance. Ready to innovate with us?

Why This Role Matters

As the Head of Software Development – Center of Excellence Lead, you will lead all software developers, grow their professional skills, support their technical excellence, accelerating innovation, and nurturing top-tier development talent.

This role bridges hands-on technical leadership, strategic vision, and organizational enablement - shaping how PassportCard Labs engineers design, build, and deliver the systems powering the next generation of insurance platforms, utilizing AI and agentic tooling as the main power source for building software.

The ideal candidate should serve as a role model for all software developers to aspire and grow their careers according to his/her professional skills and attitude.

In this role you will work with PassportCard CTO to define the professional standards, practices, and learning path for our software developers, lead innovation initiatives, make sure AI is fully exploited in development environment and tools, ensure our teams deliver scalable, secure, and modern cloud-native solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Vision

• Define and execute the software development strategy, combine the existing and modern architectures.
• Continuously explore how AI transforms the way we build software and scale-up delivery to higher levels of productivity
• Develop a clear CoE roadmap that aligns with the company’s R&D and product vision.
• Grow our vision for cloud native development environment and tooling, integrated with SaaS and On-Prem/hybrid/multi-cloud solutions
• Lead continuous innovation initiatives, introducing emerging technologies, AI tools, and development best practices.

Technical Excellence

• Establish and maintain engineering standards, coding guidelines, architectural patterns, and quality metrics across software development teams.
• Champion Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and microservices best practices.
• Build top notch cloud development expertise and knowledge base
• Evaluate and integrate cutting-edge tools, frameworks, and automation solutions that enhance productivity and reliability.

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Build, mentor, and inspire a community of software development experts within the organization.
• Guide professional development and career growth plans for software developers, including training, certifications, and internal workshops.
• Map and analyze skillsets in our software development team, and allocate resources to development teams and squads accordingly
• Instruct the creation of internal knowledge base and including documentation,
• Drive peer reviews, technical deep dives, and knowledge-sharing sessions to uplift collective technical competence.

Collaboration & Influence

• Partner with CTO, Solution Architects, DevOps, QA, and Product teams to ensure alignment between technical capabilities and business objectives.
• Work with external consultants and professional services vendors to keep team expertise ahead of the industry, and care for staff augmentation where required.
• Advise leadership prioritizing innovation initiatives that create measurable business impact.
• Act as a thought leader across teams, promoting engineering excellence and fostering a culture of continuous learning.
• Collaborate with the delivery team to maintain quality and performance benchmarks.
• Support the developer’s teams in resolving high-level architectural and performance challenges.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• 15+ years of professional experience in backend development.
• Proven track record in leading full-stack R&D teams
• Proven track record implementing Centers of Excellence and/or technical guilds.
• Thrives in matrix management environments and familiar with consulting practices
• Enthusiastic about Agile at Scale development practices and supporting tools.
• Experience applying AI tools in development workflows (Cursor, Base44, GitHub Copilot, AI agents, MCP servers, etc).
• Solid understanding of security, observability, and performance optimization.
• Deep expertise (hands-on!) in:
• OO Programming languages including Java Spring Boot, C#, .NET Core, EF Core, and microservices architecture.
• Cloud Development Environment and tooling such as Azure DevOps, Git, GitHub, Jira, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, ELK, and other observability tooling
• SQL and NoSQL databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB).
• Cloud-native systems (AWS + Azure).
• Serverless development (AWS preferrable)
• Event-driven and BPM architectures.
• Integrating SaaS Solutions APIs and frameworks
• Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks.
• Ability to learn new languages and technologies quickly.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and mentoring skills.
• Passion about growing people careers, mentoring next generation of developers, growing them to be excellent software architects
• Kean on fostering innovation, learning, and nurturing a world-class engineering culture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in fintech or insurance.
• Experience defining engineering competency frameworks or technical career paths.
• BSc. Degree in in Computer science, Engineering, or a related field (preferrable – MSc. degree, MBA)