Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. VitalSource is an education technology company delivering affordable and accessible digital learning experiences. The Engineering Manager will lead the Launch Engineering team, overseeing people development, technical direction, delivery, engineering processes, system reliability, and responsible adoption of AI-assisted development tools. The role also involves cross-functional collaboration and occasional hands-on technical contribution.
Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor, and coach a diverse team of software engineers, fostering their technical and career growth through regular feedback, performance reviews, and individual development plans. Actively participate in building, hiring, and retaining a high-performing engineering team
- Provide architectural guidance and technical oversight for your team's services. Collaborate with Product Management to define roadmaps, prioritize work, manage project scope, and ensure timely delivery of high-quality features and products
- Drive the adoption and use of generative AI tools and responsible practices within the team. Ensure team members have appropriate access, training, and support for AI-assisted development, while establishing clear norms for responsible use, code review practices, security considerations, and quality gates for AI-generated code
- Responsible for the overall engineering process of your team, championing and enforcing best practices in software engineering, architecture, security, and operational excellence (e.g., code quality, testing, CI/CD). Drive continuous improvement in development workflows against established metrics
- Ensure the team delivers high-quality, reliable, scalable, secure, and performant products and services. Manage on-call rotations, ensure proper alerting and monitoring is in place, and drive effective incident management, post-mortems, and continuous improvement in system reliability
- Communicate clearly with project stakeholders on roadmaps, delivery goals, impediments, and issues. Coordinate with other engineering leadership to integrate, deploy, and operate services. Proactively identify and address technical issues that span beyond the immediate team, influencing broader engineering leadership and guiding cross-organizational technical solutions and standards
- While your primary focus is on people leadership, you are expected to contribute hands-on to architectural design, perform thorough technical reviews, and occasionally write code as needed to unblock the team or set technical direction
Skills
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of total professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of delivering complex, large-scale systems
- 2+ years in a technical leadership or engineering management role with direct reports
- Deep understanding of technology architecture, programming languages (e.g., Ruby, Python, TypeScript), systems, and security models
- Proficiency with modern web development stacks (e.g., Ruby on Rails, FastAPI, React, MySQL) and API based architectures
- Experience building and operating reliable asynchronous messaging, event-driven systems (e.g. Pub/Sub, SQS/SNS, RabbitMQ) and background processing (e.g. Sidekiq, Celery)
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical information to diverse audiences (technical and non-technical management, product, and stakeholders)
- Demonstrated leadership, teambuilding, mentoring, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills
- Past use of Agile/Scrum or similar collaborative development methodologies
- Familiarity with modern observability solutions for monitoring, logging, and tracing production systems
- Experience developing with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform
- Experience in the EdTech sector and a passion for improving learning outcomes
- Proven experience in optimizing engineering processes and driving continuous improvement within a team context
- Demonstrated experience in implementing and managing AI tools and workflows within a development team, with a strong understanding of responsible AI principles and security considerations, and a track record of fostering quality and accountability for AI-assisted work
Benefits
- A strong variable component
- Medical, Vision, Dental, Life, Disability, Critical Illness, Accident, FSA, HSA, ID Protection, Pet and Legal Insurance
- 401K match up to 5%
- 12 weeks of paid parental leave
- Tuition reimbursement program
- Start at 4 weeks’ vacation, 12 sick days, 11 company holidays, and 3 personal days
- Flexible work schedules and remote capabilities (by team)
- Casual dress
- Fitness challenges and rewards
Company Overview
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