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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Head of Web Development

💰 $160,000 - $220,000

TechnologyEngineering ManagementWeb DevelopmentLeadership

🎯 Role Definition

Are you a strategic technology leader with a passion for building exceptional web experiences? This role requires a visionary Head of Web Development to lead, mentor, and scale our high-performing web engineering team. In this pivotal role, you will own the end-to-end technical strategy and execution for our entire web ecosystem, from our public-facing marketing sites to our complex web applications. You will be the driving force behind our technical architecture, ensuring our platforms are scalable, secure, and performant. Collaborating closely with leaders across Product, Marketing, and UX, you will translate business vision into a tangible technical roadmap, fostering a culture of innovation, quality, and continuous delivery. If you are ready to make a significant impact and shape the future of our digital presence, we want to hear from you.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Web Development Manager
  • Principal Software Engineer
  • Lead Solutions Architect
  • Director of Engineering (at a smaller organization)

Advancement To:

  • Director of Engineering
  • VP of Engineering
  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Lateral Moves:

  • Head of Platform Engineering
  • Head of Mobile Development
  • Principal Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Define and execute the long-term strategic and technical roadmap for all web properties, ensuring tight alignment with overarching business goals, product vision, and customer experience objectives.
  • Lead, mentor, and cultivate a world-class team of front-end and back-end developers, fostering a dynamic culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous professional growth.
  • Oversee the complete web development lifecycle for our corporate websites, e-commerce platforms, and web-based applications, from ideation and architectural design through to development, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.
  • Architect and implement highly scalable, secure, and resilient web solutions, making critical decisions on technology stacks, frameworks (e.g., React, Node.js), and cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, Azure).
  • Champion and enforce software engineering best practices across the team, including rigorous code quality standards, comprehensive automated testing, robust CI/CD pipelines, and agile development methodologies.
  • Act as a key strategic partner to cross-functional leaders in Product, Marketing, UX/UI, and Sales, translating complex business requirements into clear technical specifications and delivering seamless digital experiences.
  • Manage the web development budget, including resource planning, vendor negotiations, and technology licensing, to ensure maximum efficiency and return on investment.
  • Establish, monitor, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) for web platform health, including application uptime, page load performance, security posture, and user engagement metrics.
  • Drive the technical SEO strategy in close collaboration with the marketing team, ensuring our web platforms are meticulously optimized for search engine visibility, crawling, and indexing.
  • Remain on the cutting edge of emerging web technologies, development trends, and architectural patterns, proactively evaluating and advocating for their adoption to drive innovation and maintain a competitive edge.
  • Lead the technical evaluation, selection, and integration of third-party services, APIs, and Content Management Systems (CMS), including headless and traditional platforms.
  • Own and maintain the disaster recovery and business continuity plans for all critical web properties, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and rapid incident response.
  • Conduct regular, insightful code reviews, architectural design sessions, and one-on-one meetings to provide technical guidance and actively support the career development of your team members.
  • Manage project priorities, scope, and timelines within an agile framework, ensuring the predictable and timely delivery of high-quality, impactful web projects and features.
  • Develop and maintain comprehensive, high-quality technical documentation for system architectures, development processes, and coding standards to support knowledge sharing and team scalability.

Secondary Functions

  • Act as the primary technical point of contact and final escalation point for all web-related incidents, outages, and complex problem resolution.
  • Partner with the cybersecurity team to conduct regular security audits, penetration testing, and ensure full compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
  • Oversee the management, optimization, and cost-control of our cloud hosting environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure), leveraging infrastructure-as-code and automation.
  • Foster a strong DevOps and "You Build It, You Run It" culture within the team, empowering developers with full ownership of their services from development to production.
  • Present technical strategies, project status updates, performance dashboards, and post-mortems to executive leadership and other key business stakeholders.
  • Evaluate and manage relationships with external development agencies, freelancers, and technology vendors to supplement internal team capacity and specialized expertise.
  • Champion a data-driven decision-making culture, utilizing web analytics, A/B testing results, and user feedback to inform development priorities and continuously improve the user experience.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert-level proficiency in modern front-end technologies, including JavaScript (ES6+), TypeScript, HTML5, CSS3, and major component-based frameworks like React, Vue.js, or Angular.
  • Extensive hands-on experience with server-side languages and frameworks such as Node.js (Express/NestJS), Python (Django/Flask), or PHP (Laravel/Symfony).
  • Deep knowledge of web architecture, API design patterns (REST, GraphQL), microservices, and serverless computing principles.
  • Demonstrable expertise with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).
  • Strong command of database design and management for both relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis) databases.
  • Proven experience designing, implementing, and managing robust CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions, along with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
  • In-depth experience with a variety of Content Management Systems (CMS), including headless options (Contentful, Strapi) and traditional platforms (WordPress, Drupal).
  • Mastery of web performance optimization techniques, web security best practices (OWASP Top 10), and the principles of technical SEO.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional leadership, coaching, and team-building skills with a proven track record of attracting, developing, and retaining top engineering talent.
  • Visionary and strategic thinker with the ability to articulate a compelling technical vision and translate it into an actionable, multi-quarter roadmap.
  • Superb project management and organizational capabilities, with deep expertise in Agile, Scrum, and/or Kanban methodologies for managing complex, concurrent projects.
  • Outstanding verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to effectively engage, influence, and build consensus with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, from individual contributors to the C-suite.
  • Strong business acumen, including experience with budget management, resource forecasting, and vendor contract negotiation.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's Degree

Preferred Education:

  • Master's Degree

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 10-15+ years

Preferred: A minimum of 10 years of progressive, hands-on experience in full-stack web development, coupled with at least 5 years in a formal leadership or management role. The ideal candidate will have a proven history of managing a team of developers, owning the technical strategy for large-scale, public-facing web applications, and driving significant business impact through technology.

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