Software Engineering Team Manager

Pearson Virtual Schools serves K-12 students and their teachers on Connexus, a large-scale student, curriculum, and assessment data platform. The Data Foundations project establishes the trusted data platform, ownership model, migration path, and engineering operating model needed to make this data reliable, secure, accessible, and usable for analytics, operational reporting, interoperability, and future AI-enabled product capabilities. This role is accountable for leading the engineering execution required to modernize that foundation while protecting continuity for current platform consumers.

We are modernizing a platform that today runs primarily on legacy .NET Frameworks: IIS-based ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC, an AngularJS and jQuery front end, and SQL Server. The future is design-system-based React and Type Script single-page applications calling .NET REST services that operate in containerized modern .NET, and integrate with an API-first, event-driven model on AWS with externalized authorization. Your teams will work on both sides of this technology, the legacy and the new.

The platform is becoming agentic across every exposed product area, not only in the teams whose names say AI. That changes what an engineering manager is accountable for. Wherever your team's surface reaches a student, a family, a teacher, or school staff, you own the guardrails, the human-in-the-loop fallback, the disclosure, and the evidence that the behavior was evaluated before release.

That obligation does not vary by team.

You are expected to be AI-native in how you manage. That means you can review work produced by engineers operating at our bar for AI-fluent engineering, understand the role and limits of evaluation sets, and treat quality as a release gate rather than a late-stage phase.

• Own planning, prioritization, and delivery commitments for your team, and the operating rhythm that makes progress visible without a status meeting
• Allocate people to work, manage escalations, and resolve blockers quickly and transparently
• Recommend and land process improvements rather than escalating the same friction twice

• Hire against our bar for AI-fluent engineering, and hold it when the pipeline is thin

• Treat every exposed product surface as one that will carry agentic capability, and apply the same obligations whether or not the team's name says AI
• Require an evaluation set with a stated pass bar, wired into the release gate, before model-backed behavior reaches a student
• Ensure guardrails, human-in-the-loop fallback, escalation, and disclosure are designed into the interaction rather than added after a complaint
• Monitor reliability, hallucination, and model performance against stated thresholds, and treat drift as a defect rather than as news

• Hold specification-first practice: contract-level tests before the implementation, negative tests as a first-class obligation, and evals wherever behavior is model-backed
• Ensure the automated merge gates run and are not routinely overridden, and treat a suite that never fails as a defect rather than a result
• Drive the team's contribution to the governed shared library, so skills, MCP servers, evaluation suites, and golden datasets leave the team rather than staying in it

• Coach capability deliberately, so the team's ceiling rises rather than its hours
• Run performance and development conversations on a rhythm, not only at review time
• Build succession inside the team, so no specialization sits with exactly one person

• Lead the overall engineering delivery for Data Foundations, including roadmap execution, platform readiness, migration sequencing, cutover planning, dependency management, and coordination across source systems, downstream consumers, and partner teams
• Set expectations for data contracts, quality gates, lineage, observability, access controls, operational readiness, and support ownership across the data domains the team manages
• Partner closely with Product, Data Engineering, Data Analytics, Solution Architecture, Security, Compliance, our Dev Ops and SRE platform team, and vendor teams to align delivery priorities, resolve dependencies, and protect continuity during modernization

• 4+ years managing engineers who ship to production, including hiring, performance, and development
• A working…