Vice President of Research & Development
Harris Computer · Remote Oklahoma · $125,000–$135,000 (stated in the posting)
AI Fluency and Agentic Delivery
- Use AI development tools personally and daily, holding a current and practical command of what they can and cannot do rather than relying on secondhand reporting.
- Research and experiment continuously with new AI tooling, models, and workflows, then bring what proves out into the organization's standard practice.
- Lead every development team to agentic, human-on-the-loop delivery, where AI agents own bounded work end to end while engineers set goals, define guardrails, and review outcomes.
- Own the AI delivery-maturity roadmap across all actively supported products, applied stage by stage across the lifecycle rather than as a single global rating.
- Stand up the governance that makes delegated agent work safe, including review gates, validation, security review of AI-generated code, and measurable outcome reporting.
- Make the codebase and delivery pipeline accessible to AI agents through documentation, test coverage, CI/CD, and structured context.
- Build the tooling and training program that moves engineers from AI-assisted work, to AI-directed work, to fully delegated agent execution.
- Report AI delivery maturity and the business outcomes it produces on a recurring executive cadence.
Technical Roadmap and AI-Driven Opportunity
- Set the multi-year technical roadmap for the Corrections and Law Enforcement product lines, planned against the pace agentic delivery now makes possible rather than the timelines conventional development assumed.
- Rebuild roadmap assumptions around that acceleration. Pull committed work forward where AI-enabled delivery shortens the build, and direct the recovered capacity toward customer problems that were previously out of reach.
- Plan the roadmap around customer problems as much as product features, judging each item on whether AI can reach the outcome faster than a conventional build cycle would.
- Decide deliberately where AI belongs embedded in the products customers buy and where it is better applied as a fast path to a customer outcome, and treat both as revenue opportunities rather than internal efficiency alone.
- Balance that acceleration against customer commitments already in flight and the realities of an installed base that cannot absorb change at an unlimited rate.
- Own technology standards, architectural direction, and technical documentation across the portfolio, and hold the development organizations to them.
- Evaluate build, buy, and consolidation options where product lines overlap, and bring recommendations with supporting analysis to the Executive Vice President.
- Monitor industry direction, competitor capability, and emerging technology relevant to law enforcement, corrections, and justice software.
Delivery and Execution
- Own release commitments across every development team, including scope, sequencing, and the dates communicated to customers and to sales.
- Establish a single reporting cadence for status, blockers, and slips so that risk surfaces early rather than at the release gate.
- Standardize development process, tooling, and engineering metrics across companies that today operate independently.
- Resolve cross-team dependencies and resource contention, and escalate the trade-offs that require an executive decision.
Product Quality and Security
- Set and enforce quality standards covering code review, automated testing, defect thresholds, and release readiness, applied equally to human-written and AI-generated code.
- Maintain the highest levels of product and platform security, promoting a culture and practice of security awareness in every development team.
- Ensure development activities meet the regulatory, contractual, and industry requirements that apply to public safety and justice customers.
- Partner with Support Services to close the loop between escalated customer issues and engineering priorities.
Team Leadership and Development
- Lead, mentor, and develop the development managers and directors across the portfolio companies, setting clear goals and performance expectations.
- Recruit and retain engineering talent, and build succession depth in every key technical role.
- Set the expectation that every engineer works with AI tools as a normal part of the job, and give them the training, access, and time to get there.
- Structure the organization for the work ahead, including the balance between onshore, offshore, and contract capacity, and the reshaping that agentic delivery makes possible.
- Promote transparency and collaboration by making priorities, progress, and decisions visible across the organization.
Financial and Resource Ownership
- Own the R&D budget across the portfolio, including headcount planning, capitalization, AI tooling spend, and vendor commitments.
- Contribute R&D inputs to the monthly forecast and to quarterly executive reporting, with explanations for variance against plan.
- Drive measurable improvement in development cost as a percentage of revenue without sacrificing delivery or quality.
- Allocate engineering capacity to the products and initiatives with the strongest return, and defend those choices with data.
Platform Modernization
- Lead platform migration and modernization programs, including the sequencing and customer impact of each phase.
- Retire technical debt and legacy dependencies on a published schedule rather than opportunistically, recognizing that a cleaner codebase is also a more AI-accessible one.
- Measure adoption and business impact of new capability, and stop investment that does not earn its place.
Stakeholder and Executive Communication
- Act as the primary liaison between R&D and Operations, Support, Product Management, Sales, and Finance.
- Present roadmap progress, AI maturity, risk, and investment recommendations to executive leadership in terms a non-technical audience can act on.
- Engage directly with customers, partners, and user groups to validate direction and to hear where the products fall short.
- Support due diligence and technical integration for acquisitions that join the portfolio.
Experience and Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.
- Ten or more years in software development with at least three years leading engineering organizations at director level or above.
- Demonstrated hands-on use of AI development tools in daily work, with a clear point of view on where they help, where they fail, and how quickly that is changing.
- Experience raising an engineering organization's way of working from individual AI assistance to agentic, human-on-the-loop delivery, including the governance and validation that makes it safe.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, cloud technologies, modern development methodologies, and enterprise software delivery.
- A record of translating AI capability into customer-facing value and revenue, not only internal development efficiency.
- Proven ownership of a multi-product or multi-company development portfolio, including budget accountability.
- Experience delivering enterprise software to public sector, public safety, or other regulated markets is strongly preferred.
- Track record modernizing legacy platforms while continuing to support an installed customer base.
- Working command of modern architecture, cloud delivery, and secure development practice, including security review of AI-generated code.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Performance Measurement
Success in this role is measured on the following:
- AI delivery maturity: Teams advancing to agentic, human-on-the-loop delivery on the published stage-by-stage plan
- Roadmap acceleration: Committed work delivered ahead of conventional timelines, with the recovered capacity visibly redeployed
- AI-driven revenue: Customer problems solved and revenue generated through AI capability, whether embedded in the products or applied as a fast path to an outcome
- Release predictability: Committed releases delivered on the dates given to customers and to sales
- Product quality: Escaped defect and escalation volume trending down release over release
- Financial performance: R&D spend held to plan, with development cost as a percentage of revenue improving
- Organizational health: Retention of key engineering talent and depth in every critical technical role
- Cross-functional standing: Support, Sales, and Operations report a working, transparent relationship with R&D
Salary range: $125,000 - $135,000 USD per year.