The Team: The talented and creative people in Morningstar`s Software Division help make technology one of our core strengths. We believe in building great products in-house in a highly collaborative, agile environment where we focus on technical excellence, the user experience, and continuous improvement. Whether it`s through open-source development or the transition to cloud and mobile computing, we`re always pushing technology`s boundaries to find new and better ways to serve investors. Though the individuals in our division represent a range of skills and experience levels, they all view software development as a craft and care deeply about creating a positive user experience. You`ll work across offices and cultures with smart people who are driven to find better ways to create great products integrating best practices in technology and investing.

The Role: In this role, you will be responsible for operations & special projects for Morningstar.com. This role will require a technical leader who can architect solutions, get underneath production issues & deliver on cross-cutting projects across various functional teams. You will be tasked driving with both strategic initiatives and ensuring platform stability. An ideal candidate would be a self-starter who gets technology as an art, understands business goals and creates scalable, flexible technical solutions. The candidate would provide technical direction and ensure modern software development practices are being applied with rigor. They would cultivate a culture of high energy and technical excellence. This is a Chicago-based position.

Responsibilities
+ Architect and provide technical direction for key projects.
+ Lead team to collaborate on good object oriented designs & domain modeling. Enforce good agile practices like test driven development, CI.
+ Hands-on development will be an integral part of the responsibilities.
+ Communicate with other tech leads & deliver cross-team projects effectively. That is, successfully roll out our monitoring strategy, provide technical direction on the content strategy, etc.
+ Understand the application environment and proactively address performance and availability issues.
+ Improve the mean time to identify, respond and repair.
+ Develop areas of continuous and automated deployment.
+ Create a technical roadmap to improve site stability and improvement of key metrics.

Requirements
+ 8+ years of experience.
+ Strong leadership, communication, and collaboration skills.
+ Experience in analysis, design, coding, and implementation of large-scale Java/.NET object oriented applications & web 2.0 applications.
+ Experience in architecting solutions and understanding of long term implications of technical decisions.
+ Ability to work without detailed direction. Strong self starters will do well in this role.
+ Strong knowledge on OO design including design patterns & their applicability.
+ Experience with Agile Methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum.
+ Ability to mentor developers & enforce good development practices like encapsulation, composition, continuous integration & test driven development.
+ Working knowledge of MySQL/SQL Server. Exposure to Unix/Linux.

Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.