Director of IT Job Cincinnati area,Ohio USA,Software Development

Key Responsibilities

Own the products
Co‑own each product's strategy, roadmap, and lifecycle with its Business Product Owner.
Manage the backlog and sequence work against business goals and the dependencies between the two products, not just the request queue.
Develop business cases and set each product's metrics, from family adoption and engagement to district retention and safe, on‑time service.
Partner with the business on commercialization and pricing.
Decide where AI belongs inside the products, such as how families get answers or how trip exceptions get handled, and define the evals that judge whether it works.
Build with agents
Direct AI coding agents to build applications, workflows, and AI‑enabled tools from first prototype through production, and stay with what you ship after it is live.
Read all agent output critically, including your own.
Reject work that only looks finished, and use tests, evals, and the framework's gates to prove behavior rather than assert it.
Own the product side of agentic delivery
Own how work enters the framework, from the prototypes used to agree on requirements to the specs, acceptance criteria, and evals that define done, and how delivered work is judged against the business need.
Define the data, privacy, and safety requirements for your products, with the highest bar for students whose information needs the most protection, and work with the framework's owners so the system enforces them.
Bring the senior technical team specific evidence on where the framework slows product work down, and bring the case for tools and techniques that earn their place.
Work directly with the business
Elicit requirements from people who describe outcomes, not specifications, and ask the questions that surface the real constraint: who uses it, how often, and what happens when it fails.
Ground decisions in a deep understanding of your users, from families following a student's ride to district staff, operations teams, and local providers, and test designs with them early.
Partner with business leaders on how technology can serve their goals, lead cross‑department work, and keep leadership current on what was decided and why.
Lead and grow the team
Develop the people you lead into agentic roles along a clear path: requirements, then agent‑ready specs and evals, then prototypes, then small changes shipped to production.
Teach through real work, with reviews that build judgment, not just fix mechanics.
Recruit and retain the people who will grow this capability as the team expands.
Manage the investment
Own the budget for your products and team, including AI tooling and model usage, and find savings where agents can now do work that once required a vendor or a larger team.
Source and manage vendors, negotiate contracts, and hold vendors to their commitments.

Required Qualifications

Hands‑on experience building working software with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or successors), beyond using them as autocomplete. Show us what you have built and explain the decisions behind it.
10+ years across product management, software delivery, and technology leadership, with a history of owning product strategy and delivering measurable results.
Experience leading products alongside business owners under clear decision rights.
Experience turning vague, verbally described needs into the specs, acceptance criteria, and evals that people and agents build from, and an understanding of why a passing test is not proof that a change is correct.
Ability to read code you did not write, well enough to catch an agent's mistakes and explain them, in more than one language or platform.
Solid grasp of software architecture and data principles, from service boundaries and where state lives to data quality…