Tech Lead/Manager, Software Engineering

Cengage is a global education technology company dedicated to providing affordable, quality digital products and services to learners. As a Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a team focused on delivering innovative tools for Cengage Learning Platforms while ensuring quality and accessibility through collaboration with product and design teams.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing engineering team focused on quality, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Reimagine and optimize software delivery processes using modern tools, 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 in front of 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
• Working knowledge of AI concepts, including machine learning, LLMs, multimodal models, prompt engineering, AI agents, RAG, and vector databases
• Hands-on experience integrating or experimenting with commercial and open-source GenAI technologies and toolkits (e.g., coding assistants, OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangChain)
• Experience in 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 solutions on AWS, GCP, or Azure, including 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
• Demonstrated success organizing teams and delivery around a Product Operating Model
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills in distributed, remote-first environments
• Ability to clearly communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executives