VP, Software Engineering - Core Systems

What you'll do here:

As Vice President, Core Systems within Product Technology in the Digital organization, you will lead the organization responsible for shared technology capabilities that enable Cengage's digital products to scale across multiple markets and future verticals.

This role serves as a critical member of Digital Technology leadership team, partnering closely with leaders across Higher Education, School, English Language Learning and Work. You will guide teams dedicated to shared core capabilities and advance Cengage's Core Systems strategy. You will build, buy oar partner to implement reusable capabilities once and scale them across vertical solutions. Business units will tailor the last mile for their specific markets and customers.

You will partner closely with teams in Digital Product, Technology, Dev Ops, Information Security, IT operations to modernize our technology ecosystem, reduce platform complexity, improve reliability, accelerate delivery, and enable AI-powered learning experiences for learners, instructors, institutions, and workforce customers.

You are a collaborative and pragmatic technology leader. You can build high-performing distributed teams and lead sophisticated modernization work. You operate effectively across product, platform, content, and key collaborators. You are expected to use data, customer insight, engineering judgment, and operational metrics to prioritize work and improve outcomes for learners, instructors, internal teams, and business partners.

• Own the technology strategy, roadmap, and operating model for the core systems in support of the Product Technology strategy and Cengage's enterprise product priorities.
• Advance the “build once, scale everywhere” strategy by creating reusable capabilities that improve scalability, reduce duplication, increase consistency, and accelerate speed to market.
• Drive modernization of Core Systems through generative AI technologies, cloud-native architecture, API-first integration, service simplification, automation, observability, and retirement or consolidation of legacy capabilities. Lead consolidation efforts across technology domains, including search and discovery, entitlements and license management, assessment services, data platforms, and other shared capabilities.
• Establish shared AI infrastructure, data, retrieval, observability, safety, and platform services that enable product teams to create smart, adaptive learning experiences responsibly and efficiently.
• Partner with product and business leaders to increase the adoption of shared capabilities, while ensuring each business unit can tailor experiences for its market needs. Partner with Security, Privacy, Legal, and Compliance teams to ensure Core Systems support data protection, retention, obfuscation, auditability, academic integrity, and global privacy requirements.
• Drive operational excellence through strong engineering practices, automation, CI/CD, observability, incident management, workload forecasting, and service level agreements. Build, develop, and mentor a high-performing engineering leadership team, with talent pipelines and succession plans, fostering accountability, transparency, technical excellence, inclusion, and continuous improvement. Champion modern software delivery practices, AI-enabled development workflows, test automation, secure development, and disciplined portfolio execution.
• Evaluate and recommend build, buy, and partner options for Core Systems capabilities, balancing strategic differentiation, cost, speed, risk, interoperability, and long-term ownership. Create financial and operational transparency for shared services, including cost allocation, platform usage, product-level cost visibility, reliability metrics, and Core Systems investment tradeoffs.

• 15+ years of software, platform, or enterprise technology experience, including substantial leadership of shared services or platform engineering organizations.
• 8+ years of senior engineering leadership experience, including leading leaders and geographically distributed teams across multiple domains, systems, and time zones.
• Experience defining and executing platform or shared-services strategies across complex product portfolios
• Experience running high-availability enterprise systems with clear reliability targets, incident management practices, oversight of system performance, and service-level accountability.
• Experience leading AI-enabled product platforms, personalization services, intelligent search, learning analytics, or enterprise data capabilities.
• Experience modernizing legacy platforms, monolithic systems, and fragmented technology ecosystems into scalable, cloud-native, modular architectures.
• Demonstrated success leading consolidation and simplification efforts that reduce technical debt, operational burden, platform duplication, and cost.
• Experience managing budgets, vendor relationships, platform investment tradeoffs, and cost…