Principal/Director, Application Development

AIM Consulting is seeking a Principal Engineer responsible for building a practice and expanding our consulting services in Application Development for our Chicago clients. The candidate must be an expert software engineer practitioner passionate about code and capable of delivering solutions that are modern, holistic, scalable and sustainable. This position will also support sales efforts—contact introductions, pitches, estimation, presentation, and contract negotiation—to help the practice grow and be successful. As the practice evolves, the candidate will need to manage a team, mentor talent, and support career development for his/her practice consultants. The ideal candidate will be an evangelist for AIM Consulting overseeing thought leadership while building the brand through speaking opportunities relevant to the Practice.

This Director must be a long-time resident with extensive management consulting experience in the Chicago marketplace with contacts and client connections. Prior experience with a big name national or global consulting company is a plus and highly preferred.

AIM Consulting's approach to application development is team-centric and holistic, from architecture and design, to building high-quality, automated, cloud-enabled custom applications, to helping clients modernize their software development processes and methodologies. We have a highly flexible engagement model allowing clients to engage our experts in project-based solutions, through our managed services, as individual contributors or via distributed development team(s).

Day-to-day, you will be responsible for:

• Define Strategy – Create plans annually and refine quarterly. Plans will include technology and services, financials, and growth targets.
• Thought Leadership – Maintain an asset library (articles, reference architectures, case studies, presentations, etc.) of content that is vital to our Practices’ success. Work with other thought leaders to create content to fill gaps. Continue to update content to make sure it’s relevant.
• Mentorship and Guidance – Hire and grow leaders. Help them achieve career objectives and find new ways to support the business. Sharing industry standard best practices, or modern architectural improvements.
• Technology Education – Create programs to continue to educate our teams. Focus on areas of poor performance or new technology. Make investments in hands-on workshops and certifications.
• Sales – Creating compelling and differentiating proposals. To do so, requires multiple hands-on discovery sessions with both AIM and client resources. Gathering all of the requirements is critical to creating dynamic proposals that resonate with potential clients.
• Statements of Work – Work is done based off contracts that have been mutually agreed upon. You will be working with others to create these contracts, based on client conversations and discovery sessions. Knowing what’s in and out of scope, as well as the expectations of milestones and release schedules is required.
• Project Estimation – Being able to estimate work items, create a product roadmap, define an adequate team composition, and estimate costs.
• Continuous Improvement – You should be focused on continually learning and increasing your value both individually and collectively. Using retrospectives to help you understand where you have room to grow and capitalizing on it.
• Community Development – Organizing and leading discussions and events within the organization. Creating workshops, sharing seed projects, collaborating on process improvements.
• Interviewing – Making sure we select the right people to make AIM successful is huge. We need our senior people to help us weed out those that aren’t right for AIM, and make sure we don’t miss out on those that will make us even better.

About You

You are an achievement-oriented software development leader with a strong desire for continued growth and leadership opportunities. You have excellent negotiation, conflict management, problem solving and decision-making skills with a proven track record of client engagement satisfaction. You are driven to delivering excellent products and have a consistently high level of customer service.

Required Skills:

• 10+ years of experience in custom application development / application architecture / enterprise architecture, systems integration, and relational databases.
• 5+ years as a Consultant owning delivery of projects for enterprise customers using an agile methodology.
• Excited about driving pre-sales, eliciting business requirements, and crafting / articulating solutions to customers.
• Able to estimate application development and integration engagements using a proven methodology.
• Expertise in multiple technology platforms / languages: .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, etc.
• Must be passionate about software development.
• Highly effective communication skills with client-facing and executive level management.
• Experience managing both large and small teams.

Desired Skills:

• Experience with Cloud infrastructure and services (AWS, Azure).
• Experience with modern JavaScript frameworks (Angular, React, Vue, etc.).
• Experience with HTML5 and CSS3 (including Sass and/or Less).
• Experience building out continuous integration environments.

What it is like to work for AIM: We are a focused, energetic group of people working together with passion, enthusiasm, and commitment to being an industry leader in technology consulting services. We lead by developing and maintaining long-term relationships with our consultants and clients. We invest in our employees, fostering career growth by enabling access to training, encouraging personal development, and by providing mentorship. All of our employees are encouraged to be creative and are driven to succeed. We value honest communication, reward performance, and produce high quality results and happy clients. Our days are competitive, fast, fun, and exciting.

We are a diverse group of individuals: no two people, ideologies, or thoughts are the same. Our different experiences and perspectives are our strengths. We are passionate about seeing each other succeed and live & breathe our company values; we choose positivity, we take ownership, we are relationship driven, we build trust, and we are self-aware. We work hard to come through for our clients, and also for one another. We are many unique people, with the same common goal in mind – to connect, inspire and empower our customers by leveraging an amazing workforce to help solve business challenges, drive innovation and produce results that exceed expectations. Simply put, we are more than a company; we are our client’s trusted advisors.

AIM Consulting is an Equal Opportunity Employer. AIM Consulting provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. AIM Consulting complies with applicable state and local laws governing non-discrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. Reasonable accommodation is available for qualified individuals with disabilities, upon request.