Application Development Manager

Fehr & Peers is a transportation planning and engineering firm that helps public and private clients make confident, well-informed decisions about transportation. We bring together data, technology, and community insight to design safer, more effective ways for people and goods to move.

We are hiring an Application Development Manager to lead a three-person Application Development team within our 11-person IT group. This is a player-coach role for someone who still enjoys writing code, mentoring developers, solving technical problems, and bringing structure to how software gets built, reviewed, secured, and maintained.

This is a hybrid role based in either Roseville or Sacramento offices. You’ll typically come into the office two days per week, with occasional travel to Walnut Creek (usually quarterly).

This is not a traditional software manager role. You will stay close to the code, and help shape development practices in an environment where technology directly supports planners, engineers, data scientists, and project teams. You will have room to build structure, but you will also need to be practical, collaborative, and comfortable advising people who may not think like developers.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a three-person team focused on application development, database engineering, enterprise applications, and internal tooling
• Set priorities and balance enterprise application support, custom tools, client-related project needs, and time-sensitive requests from across the firm
• Coach developers through hands‑on technical guidance, not just delegation
• Model a leadership style rooted in fairness, openness, humility, problem-solving, and respect for people’s lives inside and outside of work

• Design, develop, and maintain internal applications, shared tooling, and system integrations
• Support custom data tools, dashboards, data processing pipelines, and analysis platforms used in project work
• Support enterprise systems such as SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Esri ArcGIS, Deltek Vantagepoint, and Box
• Keep database infrastructure reliable, secure, fast, and well documented
• Establish practical support standards for applications used by internal staff and project teams

• Advise colleagues on when to build, buy, integrate, automate, or use AI-assisted development
• Partner with leaders and project teams to understand needs, priorities, risks, and tradeoffs
• Explain development priorities, timelines, and technical decisions in plain language
• Provide training and guidance that helps staff use technology more effectively

• Use tools such as Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, or Git Hub Copilot as part of your own development workflow
• Model responsible AI-assisted development practices for the team
• Coach team members on how to use AI coding tools while continuing to build strong engineering fundamentals
• Guide development of custom AI tools, such as Model Context Protocol servers and Retrieval Augmented Generation scripts
• Help staff outside the Application Development team use AI coding tools thoughtfully and safely

• Develop and refine software development life cycle processes so multiple developers can work effectively on the same codebase
• Design and implement code review processes for tools built with or without AI assistance
• Continue rolling out our Git Lab tiered governance model, including sandbox, internal, and production tiers
• Maintain coding, security, and deployment standards across our development ecosystem
• Work with IT Operations and cybersecurity colleagues to keep development, staging, and production environments appropriately segmented and secured

• 5+ years of experience in software development, Dev Ops, or a closely related field
• 2+ years of experience in leadership, management, or senior technical mentorship
• Hands‑on development experience, including writing code and building applications
• Strong proficiency in Python and JavaScript or Type Script
• Experience with modern development practices,…