Sr Manager, Software Engineering

We believe in the power and joy of learning

At Cengage Group, our employees have a direct impact in helping students around the world discover the power and joy of learning. We are bonded by our shared purpose – driving innovation that helps millions of learners improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education.   

Our culture values inclusion, engagement, and discovery

Our business is driven by our strong culture, and we know that creating an inclusive workplace is absolutely essential to the success of our company and our learners, as well as our individual well-being. We recognize the value of diverse perspectives in everything we do and strive to ensure employees of all levels and backgrounds feel empowered to voice their ideas and bring their authentic selves to work. We achieve these priorities through programs, benefits, and initiatives that are integrated into the fabric of how we work every day. To learn more, please see https://www.cengagegroup.com/about/inclusion-and-belonging/.   

What you'll do here:

As a Sr Engineering Manager / Technology Lead in our Product Technology and Innovation organization, you are responsible for the delivery of innovative, market leading platforms and products that continue to improve the education technology industry. Specifically, you will lead technology teams in our Internal Operations business unit which includes our Content Systems, Content workflows and Content AI platforms. As a successful technology leader, you will build and lead remote software engineering organizations using agile principles to architect and deliver high availability enterprise software. You will partner closely with product and design teams and lead through data driven insights. With an eye toward customer centric focus, you will be obsessing about customer outcomes in every decision made and drive measurable improvements in user engagement.   

In this role, you will divide time, effort and attention between team management responsibilities and product development responsibilities - leading multiple software development teams for content workflow automation, application development and platform support. This is a multi-functional and agile team environment. You will work jointly with other technology and product leads to provide direction and leadership to the agile teams. Managers must be comfortable with situational leadership, able to function equally well as a leader or as a team member respecting the team opinion.    

• Adopt agile methodologies and the principles of a customer centric product model to drive iterative development, continuous improvement, and rapid time-to-market. Work closely with cross functional teams to define user stories, prioritize backlog items, and ensure timely and high-quality product releases.

• Communicate clearly across product teams, technology teams, learning designers, interface designers and domain authorities in different parts of the organization.

• Meet with product partners, customers and other technologists to understand customers’ content, learning and technological needs; provide guidance on technology solution options.

• Monitor product performance, analyze performance data, and gather user feedback to continuously iterate and improve the product. Conduct post-release evaluations, retrospectives, and A/B testing to inform future product enhancements and strategic decision-making.

• Design, architect, and implement new features and functionality with the expectation that you will own and drive the development using an iterative methodology and deliver products that scale to support our millions of customers.

• Responsible for ensuring our customers enjoy a consistently reliable and high-performing experience with our platforms, available 24/7.

• Stay up to date with emerging technologies and industry trends and integrate relevant advancements into our product roadmaps.

• Cultivate a high-performance, transparent culture of continuous improvement focused on accountability and results.   

Skills you'll need here:    

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and recent, relevant work experience.

• 5+ years of technology leadership experience, including developing technology strategies, fostering innovation, and leading distributed teams across multiple time zones.    

Generative AI & Emerging Technologies  

• Working knowledge of generative AI concepts and frameworks, such as LLMs, multimodal models, prompt engineering, AI agent orchestration, retrieval augmented generation, and vector databases.

• Hands-on experience integrating or experimenting with commercial and open-source GenAI technologies and toolkits (e.g., OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangChain).

• Familiarity with agentic workflows and AI-enabled automation for applications such as content management, search, personalization, or workflow optimization.

• Motivation to be up-to-date with advancements in GenAI, MLOps, and digital transformation.  

Enterprise Architecture & Cloud Platforms  

• 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 to integrate legacy systems with modern solutions.

• Comfortable architecting and deploying solutions on public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including storage (S3), compute (EC2, Lambda), containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and serverless computing.

• Understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, AWS CDK) for automated, scalable deployments.   

Software Engineering & Product Delivery   

• Proven ability to build secure, resilient, scalable, high-availability enterprise systems for global user bases.

• Experience implementing and operating CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and code quality practices.

• Skilled in agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe), with the ability to foster high-performing teams and use tools like Jira or Azure DevOps to support efficient, priority-aligned delivery.  

Collaboration & Communication  

• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills—able to partner effectively with cross-functional teams, including product, design, and engineering, in distributed and remote-first environments.

• Experienced in breaking down complicated technical concepts for diverse technical and non-technical audiences, including executives and partners.

• Proficient in using project management and collaboration tools (such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms) to drive outcomes and alignment.   

Growth Mindset & Adaptability   

• Proactive approach to learning new technologies, embracing experimentation, and incorporating emerging practices into platforms and teams.

• Commitment to continuous improvement for both product and engineering culture.    

Cengage Group is committed to working with broad talent pools to attract and hire strong and most qualified individuals. Our job applicants are considered regardless of race, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, disability, age, veteran status, and any other 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 [email protected] or at +1 (617) 289-7917.   

About Cengage Group

Cengage Group, a global education technology company serving millions of learners, provides affordable, quality digital products and services that equip students with the skills and competencies needed to be job ready. For more than 100 years, we have enabled the power and joy of learning with trusted, engaging content, and now, integrated digital platforms. We serve the higher education, workforce skills, secondary education, English language teaching and research markets worldwide. Through our scalable technology, including MindTap and Cengage Unlimited, we support all learners who seek to improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education.   

Compensation

At Cengage Group, we take great pride in our commitment to providing a comprehensive and rewarding Total Rewards package designed to support and empower our employees. Click here to learn more about our Total Rewards Philosophy.

The full base pay range has been provided for this position. Individual base pay will vary based on work schedule, qualifications, experience, internal equity, and geographic location.  Sales roles often incorporate a significant incentive compensation program beyond this base pay range.