Tech Lead​/Manager, Software Engineering

Overview

We believe in the power and joy of learning. At Cengage, our employees have a direct impact in helping students discover the power and joy of learning through education.

Cengage's portfolio of businesses supports student choice by providing a range of pathways that help learners achieve their goals and lead a choice-filled life.

As the Software Engineering Manager, you will lead a team dedicated to creating tools to deliver a world-class experience for our Cengage Learning Platforms (CLP). Working closely with internal partners, you will define and implement an innovative, AI-first roadmap ensuring quality and accessibility remain a primary focus.

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 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.

• 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, Lang Chain).

• 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 Dev Ops
• 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.

Cengage is committed to working with broad talent pools to attract and hire strong and most qualified individuals. Our job applicants are considered regardless of any classification protected by applicable federal, state, provincial or local laws.

Cengage is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities including during our job application process. If you are an applicant with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in our job application process, please contact us at