Systems Technical Director

Systems / Technical Director At ICF Next, we are fearless in finding new ways to solve problems, relentless in making sure it pays off for our clients and committed to making a positive change in the world. Join our community of mission-driven creatives, communicators, strategists, and technologists to challenge the status quo.

The Team You'll serve as the senior engineering leader for a cross-functional program that includes engineering team leads, software engineers, solution and cloud architects, database administrators, Dev Sec Ops  engineers, quality assurance specialists, user experience professionals, business analysts, product managers, data analysts, accessibility and security specialists, and behavioral health subject matter experts. We partner with federal stakeholders to operate and modernize a mission-critical data collection and performance reporting platform used by grantees and program staff.

The Work In this program-level role, you will serve as the overall technical authority for platform operations and maintenance and for development, modernization, and enhancement. You will connect architecture, delivery, operations, and modernization into a coherent plan; guide multiple engineering work streams and team leads; make and document consequential technical decisions; establish shared standards; and ensure releases are secure, testable, supportable, and aligned with program priorities.

You will remain close enough to the technology to evaluate designs, challenge assumptions, troubleshoot difficult issues, and advise the client on options and tradeoffs. A key part of the work is balancing reliable operation of the current .NET platform with incremental modernization, improved cloud and deployment practices, stronger data quality, better observability, and a sustainable path for reducing technical debt.

Key Responsibilities:

Define and maintain the program engineering strategy, technical roadmap, architecture guardrails, and incremental modernization approach.

Lead engineering team leads and multiple development work streams by aligning priorities, capacity, dependencies, standards, and delivery expectations.

Provide technical direction across application architectures (including .NET-based systems), APIs, data models and SQL Server solutions, system integrations, analytics/reporting platforms, and cloud-hosted services.

Establish program-wide practices for secure development, automated testing, code review, CI/CD, release readiness, documentation, and production support.

Evaluate technical options and communicate recommendations, costs, risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs to program leadership and federal stakeholders.

Partner with product and delivery leaders to shape release plans, estimates, staffing needs, and acceptance criteria that are technically achievable.

Coordinate architecture and delivery across cloud, Dev Sec Ops , database, security, quality assurance, accessibility, data, user experience, and operations teams.

Identify and manage technical debt, performance constraints, reliability risks, integration dependencies, and modernization sequencing.

Oversee response to complex production issues, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and improvements to monitoring and operational readiness.

Mentor engineering leads and senior engineers, strengthen technical decision-making, and build consistent engineering practices across the program.

Maintain technical roadmaps, decision records, interface documentation, standards, and executive-ready status reporting.

Required Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
7+ years architecting, delivering, or overseeing resilient…