Manager, Engineering (Launch)

JOB DESCRIPTIO

VitalSource®, is hiring an Engineering Manager to contribute to our Launch Engineering team. This is a remote role.

As an Engineering Manager at VitalSource, you will lead a team of software engineers in developing, testing, deploying, and supporting the technology products and systems that power our mission to transform education. The Launch platform integrates schools and publishers with VitalSource and ensures millions of learners have access to their materials on Day One. This role blends people leadership with technical acumen, requiring you to cultivate a high-performing team, foster career growth, and drive technical excellence. We embrace AI-assisted development, and you will play a key role in enabling your team to leverage these tools effectively and responsibly to enhance productivity and innovation. You'll partner closely with Product Management and other engineering leaders to deliver impactful solutions that meet our strategic objectives and contribute to a world-class learning experience.

VitalSource is a mission-driven company delivering affordable, impactful learning to anyone, anywhere.

Key Responsibilities:

Team Leadership & Development: 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.

Technical Direction & Delivery: 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.

AI-Assisted Development Champion: 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.

Engineering Process & Best Practices: 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.

System Health & Reliability: 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.

Cross-functional Collaboration & Communication: 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.

Technical Contribution: 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.

Required Qualifications:

• 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.

Preferred Skills:

• 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.

Salary Range: 154,000-170,000

What We Offer:

• Culture: Collaborative, Inclusive, and Mission-driven.  A mission-driven company that values innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• More in your pocket: Competitive base salary and a strong variable component 
• We take care of all aspects of our people: Generous, well-rounded benefits such as Medical, Vision, Dental, Life, Disability, Critical Illness, Accident, FSA, HSA, ID Protection, Pet and Legal Insurance 
• Retirement: 401K match up to 5%  
• We support our families: 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Continued education: Use our tuition reimbursement program
• The Importance of Balance: start at 4 weeks’ vacation, 12 sick days, 11 company holidays, and 3 personal days
• Flexibility: flexible work schedules and remote capabilities (by team) - feel free to skip the commute and hit your deadlines from home
• Casual Dress: be as comfortable at work as you are in your own living room 
• Wellness: lots of opportunities for fitness challenges and rewards 

Who We Are:

VitalSource is the leading education technology solutions provider committed to helping partners create, deliver, and distribute affordable, accessible, and impactful learning experiences worldwide. As a recognized innovator in the digital course materials market, VitalSource is best known for partnering with more than 1,000 publishers and resellers to deliver extraordinary learning experiences to millions of active users globally—and today we’re also powering new, cutting-edge technologies designed to optimize teaching and learning for maximum results. Learn more at https://vitalsource.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, work related mental or physical disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or genetic information. 

• EEO/AA Employer/Vet/Disabled 
• We participate in EVerify. 
• EEO Poster in English 
• EEO Poster in Spanish 

Rev. Feb, 202

VitalSource is an Equal Opportunity Employe