Director of Application Engineering

Join to apply for the Director of Application Engineering role at For Futures Financial, Planning, a financial advisory practice of Ameriprise Financial Services LLC

The Director of Application Engineering provides strategic and operational leadership over all application engineering and modernization functions within Sentinels. This leader oversees multiple pods responsible for sustaining proprietary and legacy applications, ensuring secure CI/CD pipelines, driving modernization readiness, and embedding developers within sustainment teams to reduce risk and improve velocity. The role collaborates closely with peers across Platform & Cloud Infrastructure, Operations & Support, Service Delivery & Governance, and internal partners in Foundational Services, Cloud and Server Engineering to deliver a unified, SLA‑driven managed service experience.

This is a chance to lead an elite team in building a centralized sustainment model that blends engineering excellence, operational discipline, and financial performance.

• Define and execute the application sustainment and modernization strategy for 200‑250 enterprise and proprietary apps in AWS.
• Partner with Platform and Operations Directors to align build vs. run ownership models and drive automation‑based efficiency gains.
• Develop and manage quarterly objectives (OKRs) for application engineering aligned to Sentinels’ cost, compliance, and availability targets.
• Lead engineering participation in app intake, migration readiness, and sustainment transitions.
• Represent application development at enterprise governance and audit reviews.

• Lead engineering managers and developers embedded within sustainment and modernization pods.
• Oversee CI/CD pipelines, version control, and secure deployment frameworks (Git Hub Actions, Terraform, Liquibase, etc.).
• Drive codebase quality and standardization across legacy and modern app stacks (Angular
  
  JS, React
  
  JS, Python, .NET, C#, COTS customizations, etc.).
• Champion reusable modules, IaC patterns, and modernization accelerators (containerization, API gateways, etc.).
• Maintain alignment to compliance control library (e.g., code signing, vulnerability scanning, TLS 1.2+).

• Partner with the Platform Director on Terraform/IaC integration, AWS architecture, and patch readiness.
• Work with the Ops Director on incident triage, observability (Kibana/Status Cast/XMatters), and defect management.
• Collaborate with the Governance Director to ensure code and configuration audit readiness.
• Contribute to unified dashboards for executive metrics and SLA compliance reporting.

• Manage 3–4 Engineering Managers and 5–6 onshore application sustainment pods and partner closely with offshore leadership/teams.
• Establish technical mentorship programs and career paths for engineers and pod leads.
• Drive culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and automation‑first mindset.
• Support upskilling to drive removal of application SMEs across the portfolio.

• Ensure incident and change management compliance with divisional tools and procedures.
• Develop the operational discipline and proactive resiliency strategy to ensure 99.9%+ application availability for sustained apps.
• Drive toil reduction initiatives across pods.
• Collaborate on vulnerability remediation, library updates, and secure patching initiatives.
• Enforce deployment quality gates, rollback validation, and post‑release health checks.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline (Master’s preferred).
• 10+ years of experience leading application development, sustainment, or Dev Ops teams in enterprise‑scale environments.
• Proven leadership in hybrid cloud (preferably AWS) environments.
• Strong experience with CI/CD tools (Git Hub Actions, Jenkins, Terraform, Liquibase) and modern development practices (IaC, containers, microservices).
• Solid understanding of ITIL‑based service management, incident/change/release processes, and SLAs.
• Demonstrated success managing hybrid teams (U.S. + offshore) with high performance and…