You will design a graduated SDLC framework with prescriptive practice standards at each tier of criticality, pilot with real development teams, and drive adoption across the enterprise. The deliverable is a working development lifecycle - not a document.
This is a rare opportunity to define how a critical financial market utility builds software in the AI era. You will have executive sponsorship, organizational mandate, and the backing to make standards enforceable rather than advisory.
Primary Duties and Responsibilities:
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.
Design Graduated SDLC Standards and Practices
Define prescriptive practice standards across multiple tiers of development criticality - from personal experimentation through operationally critical, SCI-adjacent systems
Establish standards across key dimensions: structure, testing, documentation, error handling, dependencies, storage, review, and operability
Elevate existing documentation, architecture decisions, integration patterns, and deployment procedures to the level of detail that drives consistent results from both human and AI developers
Design documentation and testing standards that serve double duty: readable by human developers joining a project and consumable by AI agents starting a coding session
Encode tier-appropriate standards into persistent context files (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, planning templates) as a natural output of well-documented practices - not as a separate AI-specific exercise
Design graduation triggers and assessment mechanisms for artifacts moving between tiers
Enable Citizen Development at Scale
Create low-friction pathways for lower-tier development that enable experimentation without bureaucratic overhead
Design intake, classification, and registry processes for citizen-developed tools - visibility without paralysis
Solve the path from working prototype to supported environment at every tier
Drive Organizational Adoption
Pilot the graduated SDLC with 2+ development teams, iterating based on real-world feedback
Build alignment across Engineering, Architecture, Security, QA, and Governance/Risk functions
Establish a quarterly organizational learning system where operational data, code review patterns, graduation assessments, and incident post-mortems feed back into living standards
Develop training and coaching programs that help developers at every level internalize the standards - not just comply with them
Connect to Enterprise Architecture and Governance
Provide the practice standards layer underneath the existing governance framework
Coordinate with enterprise architecture to ensure SDLC standards reflect infrastructure reality
How This Role Works
If you have spent your career building things that other people's processes depend on, and you are frustrated by organizations that treat development standards as optional guidelines, this role exists to fix that.
What Success Looks Like
Timeline
Milestone
90 Days
Current SDLC variations assessed. Tier structure validated with stakeholders. Ownership model resolved.
6 Months
Practice standards published for all tiers. Context engineering templates in use. Pilot underway with 2+ teams. Intake and classification process operational.
12 Months
Standards organizationally agreed and ready for enterprise rollout. Automated validation gates active. Learning system operational with first quarterly review completed.
Requirements
The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made
Theocc · Chicago - 125 S Franklin