Tech Lead/Sr Manager, Software Engineering

Cengage is a global education technology company dedicated to improving learners' lives through innovative digital products. The Engineering Manager / Technology Lead will oversee the development of market-leading platforms, manage software engineering teams, and ensure a customer-centric approach to technology solutions in the education sector.

Responsibilities:

• Apply Agile methodologies and the principles of Product Operating Model (POM) to drive iterative development, continuous improvement, and rapid time-to-market
• Collaborate directly with engineering teams to define user stories, prioritize backlog items, and drive timely, high-quality product releases
• Act as a player/coach, both creating solutions and owning the team(s) for solution implementation
• Communicate clearly across product teams, technology teams, interface designers and domain authorities in different parts of the organization
• Meet with product partners, customers and other technologists to understand customers’ learning and technological needs; provide guidance on technology solution options
• Monitor product performance, analyze important data, and gather user feedback to continuously iterate and improve the product. Conduct post-release evaluations, retrospectives, and A/B testing to inform future product enhancements and strategic decision-making
• Design, architect, and implement new features and functionality with the expectation that you will own and drive the development using an iterative methodology and deliver products that scale to support our millions of customers
• Responsible for ensuring our customers enjoy a consistently reliable and high-performing experience with our platforms, available 24/7
• Stay up to date with emerging technologies and industry trends and integrate relevant advancements into our product roadmaps
• Cultivate a high-performance, transparent culture of continuous improvement focused on accountability and results

Requirements:

• 5+ years of leadership experience, including developing technology strategies and driving innovation
• Experience building, developing, motivating and leading a global workforce of employees and contractors across different time zones
• Strong experience modernizing monolithic architectures, implementing hybrid cloud strategies, and creating APIs to bridge legacy systems with cloud-native platforms
• Expertise in AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, CloudFormation), cloud-native development (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, AWS CDK)
• Proven track record to compose and build scalable, secure, high-availability enterprise systems, bringing to bear CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks for global user bases
• Skilled in agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe), fostering high-performing engineering teams, and using tools like Jira or Azure DevOps to ensure efficient delivery and alignment with business priorities
• Proven understanding of generative AI concepts and frameworks, such as LLMs, multimodal models, prompt engineering, AI agent orchestration, retrieval augmented generation, and vector databases
• Familiarity with agentic workflows and AI-enabled automation for applications such as content management, search, personalization, or workflow optimization
• Knowledge of AI safety, responsible AI practices, and content moderation systems
• Hands-on experience integrating or experimenting with commercial and open-source GenAI technologies and toolkits (e.g., OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangChain)
• Motivation to be up to date with advancements in GenAI, MLOps, and digital transformation
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills—capable of partnering effectively with multi-functional teams, including product, build, and engineering, in distributed and remote-first environments
• Experienced in breaking down complicated technical concepts for diverse technical and non-technical audiences, including executives and partners
• Proactive approach to learning new technologies, embracing experimentation, and incorporating emerging practices into platforms and teams
• Commitment to continuous improvement for both product and engineering culture