Vice President of Research & Development Job Iowa Louisiana USA,IT/Tech

Location: Iowa

AI Fluency and Agentic Delivery

Use AI development tools personally and daily, holding a current and practical command of what they can and cannot do rather than relying on secondhand reporting.
Research and experiment continuously with new AI tooling, models, and workflows, then bring what proves out into the organization's standard practice.
Lead every development team to agentic, human-on-the-loop delivery, where AI agents own bounded work end to end while engineers set goals, define guardrails, and review outcomes.
Own the AI delivery-maturity roadmap across all actively supported products, applied stage by stage across the lifecycle rather than as a single global rating.
Stand up the governance that makes delegated agent work safe, including review gates, validation, security review of AI-generated code, and measurable outcome reporting.
Make the codebase and delivery pipeline accessible to AI agents through documentation, test coverage, CI/CD, and structured context.
Build the tooling and training program that moves engineers from AI-assisted work, to AI-directed work, to fully delegated agent execution.
Report AI delivery maturity and the business outcomes it produces on a recurring executive cadence.

Technical Roadmap and AI-Driven Opportunity

Set the multi-year technical roadmap for the Corrections and Law Enforcement product lines, planned against the pace agentic delivery now makes possible rather than the timelines conventional development assumed.
Rebuild roadmap assumptions around that acceleration. Pull committed work forward where AI-enabled delivery shortens the build, and direct the recovered capacity toward customer problems that were previously out of reach.
Plan the roadmap around customer problems as much as product features, judging each item on whether AI can reach the outcome faster than a conventional build cycle would.
Decide deliberately where AI belongs embedded in the products customers buy and where it is better applied as a fast path to a customer outcome, and treat both as revenue opportunities rather than internal efficiency alone.
Balance that acceleration against customer commitments already in flight and the realities of an installed base that cannot absorb change at an unlimited rate.
Own technology standards, architectural direction, and technical documentation across the portfolio, and hold the development organizations to them.
Evaluate build, buy, and consolidation options where product lines overlap, and bring recommendations with supporting analysis to the Executive Vice President.
Monitor industry direction, competitor capability, and emerging technology relevant to law enforcement, corrections, and justice software.

Delivery and Execution

Own release commitments across every development team, including scope, sequencing, and the dates communicated to customers and to sales.
Establish a single reporting cadence for status, blockers, and slips so that risk surfaces early rather than at the release gate.
Standardize development process, tooling, and engineering metrics across companies that today operate independently.
Resolve cross-team dependencies and resource contention, and elevate the trade-offs that require an executive decision.

Product Quality and Security

Set and enforce quality standards covering code review, automated testing, defect thresholds, and release readiness, applied equally to human-written and AI-generated code.
Maintain the highest levels of product and platform security, promoting a culture and practice of security awareness in every development team.
Ensure development activities meet the regulatory, contractual, and industry requirements that apply to public safety and justice customers.
Partner with Support Services to close the loop…