Manager, Engineering; Launch

JOB DESCRIPTIO

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

As an Engineering Manager at Vital Source, 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 Vital Source 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-performaning 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.

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

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-performaning engineering team.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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, Type Script), 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…