Manager, Software Engineering, Content Automations

Cengage is a global education technology company serving millions of learners, providing affordable, quality digital products and services. The Software Engineering Manager will lead a team focused on automating content workflows and developing AI-powered tools to enhance efficiency and quality in education technology.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with content teams to analyze current workflows, identify automation opportunities, and design AI-first solutions that improve efficiency and quality
• Lead end-to-end delivery of automation initiatives, collaborating with onsite and offshore engineering teams as well as cross-functional partners across the organization
• Drive development of AI-powered tools through prototyping (POCs), enhancements, and continuous improvement of existing platforms
• Work closely with Product Managers and business partners to deliver innovative, scalable solutions while ensuring alignment to engineering guidelines in developing, implementation, and operations
• Following the Product Operating Model (POM), you will collaborate with product and design teams in your role as technical lead
• Together you will focus on improving customer outcomes through frequent stakeholder engagements and data-driven insights
• Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on quality, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Reimagine and optimize content creation workflows using modern platforms, automation, and generative AI
• Engage in driving POM Discovery activities including continuous customer engagement, both internal and external, to derive solutions that meet end user, company, and technology goals
• Track quality and efficiency improvements through well instrumented SDLC tools and report progress to executive teams
• Balance technical debt and other maintenance activities alongside new feature development within each sprint
• Work with partners and customers to establish and handle product backlogs, product estimates and budgets
• Stay ahead of on emerging technologies and industry trends to inject continuous innovation into our product roadmaps

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and recent, relevant work experience
• 3+ years of technology leadership experience, including developing technology strategies, fostering innovation, and leading globally distributed teams
• Solid understanding of AI concepts, technologies and methods, including machine learning, Language, Reasoning & multimodal models, prompt & context engineering, developing and using skills & agent frameworks, RAG, and vector databases
• Hands-on experience integrating or experimenting with commercial and open-source GenAI technologies and toolkits (e.g., coding assistants, OpenAI CODEX, LangChain)
• Experience in maintaining and/or modernizing legacy or monolithic architectures, migrating systems to modular, cloud-native platforms, and implementing hybrid cloud strategies
• Ability to design and develop APIs that integrate legacy systems with modern solutions
• Comfortable designing and deploying cloud native solutions on AWS, GCP, or Azure, using containers, serverless, and cloud storage/compute services
• Proven ability to build secure, resilient, scalable, high-availability enterprise systems for global user bases
• Strong experience with agile delivery (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and tooling such as Jira or Azure DevOps
• Proven success organizing teams and delivery around a Product Operating Model
• Demonstrated skills in working with cross-functional teams in distributed, remote-first environments
• Ability to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executives