Director, Software Engineering

What You'll Do

As a Director of Software Engineering at Cengage, you will be responsible for the delivery of innovative, market-leading platforms and products that continue to advance the education technology industry. You will guide our Higher Education development teams in delivering trusted digital content that improves learning and research outcomes.

• Work with multiple leaders, including the Digital leadership team and business partners, to craft a convincing technical strategy and roadmap(s) to achieve business unit goals.
• Collaborate across functions to align on priorities for scaling and building our products globally.
• Identify scalable products and deliver them to support our global customer base.
• Incorporate new technologies and industry trends into outcomes.
• Partner with multi-functional leaders through the Product Operating Model to standardize and improve development, testing, and release processes, ensuring timely delivery of quality products.
• Drive product and technology strategy reviews with Product Leaders and senior collaborators, leading strategic technological discussions.
• Lead high-performing engineering teams, developing a pipeline of high-caliber talent and encouraging leaders to achieve priorities.
• Cultivate a high-performance, transparent environment passionate about accountability and results.
• Reinvent and optimize the SDLC using modern frameworks, principles, automation, and generative AI.
• Champion a culture of continuous learning and professional development, offering team members opportunities to grow.

• 5+ years of leadership experience in developing technology strategies and driving innovation.
• 10+ years of progressive software development experience.
• Experience leading a global workforce of employees and contractors across different time zones.
• Expertise in AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, Cloud Formation), cloud-native development (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, AWS CDK).
• 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, Hugging Face, Lang Chain).
• Strong experience in modernizing monolithic architectures, implementing hybrid cloud strategies, and crafting APIs to bridge legacy systems with cloud-native platforms.
• Proven ability to compose and build scalable, secure, high-availability enterprise systems using CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks.
• Skilled in agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and customer-centric product models to drive iterative development and rapid time-to-market.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Preferred Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent combination of education and recent, relevant work experience.

Cengage is committed to working with broad talent pools to attract and hire strong and most qualified individuals. Applicants are considered regardless of any classification protected by applicable federal, state, provincial, or local laws. Cengage also provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities during the job application process.

Base salary range: $ - $ USD annually (actual amount varies based on qualifications and location). Eligible for a discretionary incentive bonus program.