Our client is a successful, profitable Canadian software company that provides powerful business solutions to enterprise clients around the world. The company is a world leader in business communications, powering more than 2 billion business connections with their cloud, enterprise and next-generation collaborative applications. Their mission is to deliver the highest value to their clients, with unparalleled industry solutions that are based on advanced proven technologies and a feature-rich enterprise suite of applications, professionally delivered with the breadth and depth of expertise harnessed by their more than 4000 employees. The firm has more than 70 million users in nearly 100 countries around the world.

As with many established market leaders, our client has and continues to make a concerted push to transition their portfolio of market offerings to the cloud and subscription models. The technology aspects of this collective task, along with managing a growing, globally distributed development organization, will be the responsibility of the new Vice-President Research and Development, Service Delivery (OSS/BSS).

Scope of the Position

Broadly, the objective of the role of the VP Research and Development, Service Delivery (OSS/BSS) is to cultivate an environment that attracts, deploys and retains the human and other resources required to effectively develop, deliver and support cloud offerings that will provide value to the company’s customers, while meeting the business strategy and goals for profitable growth.

Reporting to the SVP R&D, the VP Research and Development, Service Delivery (OSS/BSS) is responsible for providing leadership in all activities to help grow the firm’s global Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offerings. The successful candidate will lead a 100+ person global multi-site software development organization using an Agile methodology. They will set the direction for the evolution of the platform while ensuring timely delivery of new capabilities with the utmost quality.

Key Responsibilities

1. Set the tone for the organization and model expected behaviours;
2. Manage direct reports, along with their goal setting, performance measurement, and development feedback. Provide for similar initiatives across the entire engineering organization;
3. Work with the senior management team to deliver and support the company’s product roadmap consistent with and reflecting the company’s overall strategic plans for corporate growth;
4. Develop and document corporate plans and systems for product development;
5. Manage system and software architecture, planning and program delivery;
6. Lead the definition of the group’s ‘end state’ system and software architecture and deliver a clear path to achieve it;
7. Develop reliable, robust software on-time, within cost targets, using accepted, state-of-the-art methodologies balancing the demands of release content, quality and desired release dates;
8. Manage the engineering budget;
9. Audit existing and establish new scalable development platforms and processes which meet current organizational requirements, anticipates future growth and complexity and balance the need for predictability and creative license;
10. Protect proprietary products and technology information to ensure the documentation and retention of information on products and their design, within the company, and the protection of the company’s investments throughout patents, copyrights, NDAs and any other protective vehicles;
11. Maintain a keen awareness of the trends and conditions in technology, products and development tools relative to the needs of the company’s customers and business;
12. Establish key indicators for competitive performance in the completion of development projects and for rapid, realistic decisions on strategies, plans and projects;
13. Provide timely and accurate reporting on KPIs and project health;
14. Maintain an awareness of all applicable public support for development activities and for human resource development;
15. Align the product development organization’s activities with the company goals and strategic direction, as well as with the company’s corporate values in areas such as people, integrity, passion and innovation;
16. Build and facilitate the development of strong relationships and synergy with all other areas of the company, with key suppliers and with the company’s technical partners in order to achieve the corporate goals and objectives while executing product and technology development plans;
17. Foster an environment that enables highly technical staff to consistently perform with excellence, to set and meet personal and team goals, and to develop and be recognized for world-class competence in their field(s) within the context of the company’s software development programs;
18. Establish and maintain succession plans and programs for all positions within the engineering organization to ensure the smooth transition and minimize vacancies for critical roles.

Key Performance Deliverables

In light of the identified responsibilities, the following are illustrative of the type of deliverables that the position is designed to achieve.

1. Cycle time excellence and on-time product delivery to market;
2. Quality and customer satisfaction in both custom and packaged development initiatives;
3. Retention and recruiting;
4. Employee satisfaction and motivation;
5. Development of staff, e.g. Goals completed, performance reviews completed etc.;
6. Functionality and performance;
7. Budget management as well as product cost;
8. Product reliability;
9. Innovation is measured by benchmarking against competitive products;
10. Productivity, e.g. Developers/revenue ratio;
11. Responsiveness, e.g. to market changes, customers;
12. Achievement of overall corporate goals.

Competency Profile

1. Planning & Objective Setting
   Systematic in approach to work. Produces action plans in which objectives are defined, and steps for achieving them are clearly specified. Plans by breaking down a large task into subtasks. Develops plans that anticipate obstacles. Is realistic about time-scales and builds in appropriate checkpoints, milestones and controls in order to ensure that desired results are realized.
2. Results Orientation
   Focuses strongly on achieving agreed-upon outcomes and ensures that key objectives are met. Conveys a sense of urgency and drives issues to closure. Aims to improve upon past performance. Establishes aggressive personal targets and strives to achieve them.
3. Team Skills
   Helps to create a sense of team spirit and harmonious relations through cooperation and support. Balances personal goals with those of the team. Fosters collaboration among team members.
4. Role Expertise
   Demonstrates critical technical or professional knowledge/skills related to the role. Has thorough knowledge of relevant products, services and methods. Expands technical knowledge/skills and keeps up-to-date in own area of expertise.
5. People Management
   Establishes and communicates clear priorities and a sense of direction. Clarifies roles and responsibilities. Adapts management style to achieve optimum results.
6. Influence
   Articulates the key points of an argument persuasively. Negotiates skillfully and convinces others to own point of view. Directly and indirectly impacts the decisions/opinions of others. Mobilizes people into action.
7. Commercial Acumen
   Applies appropriate commercial and financial principles. Understands situations in terms of costs, profits, added value and return on investment. Appreciates the commercial impact of own work on the organization’s total expenses and revenues.
8. Boundary-Spanning
   Incorporates information about the organization’s structure and protocol into decisions. Attentive to the internal politics and alert to shifting interpersonal dynamics. Establishes the necessary support networks and cross-functional relationships through rapport building. Recognizes, maintains and effectively balances the interests and needs of one’s own group with those of the broader organization.

Preferred Experience and Education

1. University degree in Software Engineering or related field;
2. Experience in managing engineering teams of 100+ with multiple product lines;
3. Experience delivering cloud-based, scalable and highly available services;
4. Varied experience with productivity and quality enhancing engineering methodologies, including Agile;
5. Experience/understanding leading large-scale BSS/OSS transformation efforts;
6. Prior experience with UCaaS or telecom technologies and big data or mediation is desirable;
7. Experience with AWS, and GCP;
8. Ability to set architectural and technical direction in order to meet business requirements;
9. Experience in both large complex and more entrepreneurial environments;
10. Outstanding people skills to be applied within the engineering organization as well as across the executive team;
11. Management experience within an enterprise software environment of similar size or larger;
12. Experience leading global, multi-site product development;
13. Change management.

A competitive base compensation package will be offered, which shall include base salary, variable bonus, stock options, and benefits package.