Engineering Lead — Delivery & Release

Take over release coordination, lead the path to safe continuous deployment, and grow into Boodle Box's first engineering manager.

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Remote, United States

Boodle Box is a VC-backed GenAI platform built for higher education. With 100,000+ users across 1,200+ colleges and universities, we partner with faculty, staff, and students to make responsible AI adoption practical, impactful, and lasting. Our platform brings together leading AI tools — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — under one roof, purpose-built for the unique demands of academic environments.

We're guided by three core values: service, education, and collaboration.

You are the engineer the team turns to when a release gets complicated. You know what's in the build, who's blocked, and when to roll forward instead of back. You've worked on a team that deploys to production continuously, and you remember what it took to get there. You still write code. You have no intention of stopping. And you've decided, on purpose, that you want to lead people.

Boodle Box runs a generative AI platform of 20+ services on Kubernetes, serving students and faculty at 1,200+ institutions. Today our releases are scheduled, and release coordination sits with the CTO. Your first job is to take that over. Your second is to get us to safe, automated continuous deployment, bringing what you've already lived through rather than learning it alongside us.

You'll spend your first months inside the codebase, shipping real tickets, so that when you sit in a design conversation you know what you're talking about and the senior engineers know it too.

This is the first hire on Boodle Box's engineering-management track. You start with no direct reports. As we add managers through 2027, you take on a group of engineers, and the title becomes Engineering Manager. Who, and when, we'll decide together once you're here. If you've never had the manager title, that's fine. We're hiring for where you're going.

This role is fully remote, with a company hub in Colorado Springs, CO.

• Release coordination, day one. The release calendar, readiness, blockers, go/no-go — yours, in partnership with the engineers who own each service.
• The path to continuous deployment. CI/CD, automated gates, feature flags, roll-forward, backward-compatible migrations: you lead the work that turns scheduled releases into a thing that just happens.
• Delivery visibility. Everyone, including the CTO and CEO, can see what's shipping, what's stuck, and why — without a status meeting.
• Your own code. Scoped tickets, code review, design discussions. Enough to know the system and earn the room.
• How work flows. Development to QA to production, with less friction and no new process for its own sake.
• Capacity conversations. When a product architect wants engineers moved and a service owner is worried about reliability, you surface the trade-off and get it decided — you don't decide it alone.
• Eventually, people. One-on-ones, growth, feedback, hiring. It starts when the second manager joins, not before.

• You've shipped continuously. Not read about it. You've been on a team where main went to production many times a day, and you know which guardrails made that safe.
• You still read pull requests. You can look at a Scala service, a Python job, or a React component and have an opinion worth hearing.
• You've coordinated other engineers' work without a title that made them listen. Readiness tracking, blocker-clearing, the unglamorous middle of a release.
• You want to manage people. Said out loud, with reasons. You'd rather make eight engineers effective than be the best one yourself.
• You're humble about month one. You'll learn our architecture before you propose…