Director of Applied Innovation - York, NE

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IT
- York Full Time Professional York, NE, US

4 days ago Requisition

The Director of Applied Innovation leads the team that builds, deploys, and runs Central Valley Ag's custom business applications — products such as Route Forge and Gravis, the grower portal, and the applications that follow them. This is a working leadership role. The Director sets direction, develops the team, and also writes code, reviews it, and carries the hardest problems personally.

The team is small on purpose and fast on purpose. It uses AI-assisted development as a normal part of how work gets done, and it is measured on working software in the hands of CVA employees and growers — not on documents, roadmaps, or demonstrations. The Director is accountable for the availability of every application in the portfolio, for the experience of the people who use them, and for equipping CVA's support organization to carry routine support over time.

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of two: an Applied Innovation Engineer and an Applied Innovation Analyst. Hire into the team as it grows.
• Personally design, develop, and review application code. This position ships.
• Own the application portfolio roadmap. Run intake with business leaders, set priorities against business value, and decide what the team will not build.
• Establish and hold a delivery cadence that puts usable software in front of users in weeks rather than quarters, and report against it.
• Own production availability for the portfolio: deployment, release management, monitoring, and incident response.
• Establish and enforce engineering practice — version control, testing, code review, release and change management, and documentation.
• Establish the team's AI-assisted development practice: tooling, review standards, guardrails, and the appropriate handling of company and customer data.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture so that applications conform to CVA's architecture, integration, and data standards.
• Partner with IT Infrastructure and IT Security on hosting, identity, access management, and secure development practice.
• Equip CVA's support organization to support business applications: build the documentation, runbooks, training, and knowledge transfer that let tier 1 and tier 2 support be carried outside this team. Serve as the escalation point.
• Hold the boundary with the data organization:
  Applied Innovation builds the operational applications that run the business, while tools and agents whose purpose is answering questions from CVA's data belong to the Director of Data & AI Enablement. Partner with that team rather than duplicating it.
• Manage vendor relationships, cloud spend, and licensing for the application portfolio.
• Report delivery, risk, and portfolio health to the Chief Technology Officer and to business leadership.
• Other duties as assigned.

Directly supervises two positions:
Applied Innovation Engineer and Applied Innovation Analyst. Carries out supervisory responsibilities in accordance with Central Valley Ag policies and applicable laws, including interviewing and hiring, planning and assigning work, coaching and performance management, and addressing employee concerns.

All work product created in the course of employment with Central Valley Ag Cooperative — including software, source code, applications, integrations, data models, reports, documentation, designs, processes, analyses, inventions, and any other developments, whether created during or outside normal working hours…