At Skillsoft, we propel organizations and people to grow together through transformative learning experiences. We believe every team member has the potential to be AMAZING. Join us in our quest to transform learning and help individuals unleash their edge.
Vice President of AI Innovation & Platform Architecture
Position Overview
At Skillsoft, we are on a mission to make learning an essential part of everyday work. As we evolve our Percipio learning platform into the next generation AI powered intelligent learning platform, we’re seeking a visionary and technically hands-on engineering leader to drive AI innovation and lead our backend platform architecture and integration engineering teams. These teams build and manage the foundation of the Percipio platform—including enterprise integrations, administrative systems, HRIS and LMS interoperability, learning content ingestion, and data and reporting capabilities.
To thrive in our dynamic environment and support our mission of building world class talent development solutions, we have established teams across U.S., India and Europe. Our passionate engineers are driving innovation on this next-generation platform to help professionals around the world reskill and upskill.
Skillsoft is opening a new Boston-based engineering leadership position to scale our global engineering organization and lead our learner platform architecture, admin capabilities, content publishing, and integration engineering teams. As the Vice President of AI Innovation & Platform Architecture, you will be responsible for building and scaling our backend services, APIs, data systems, and third-party integrations. In this role, you will report to the SVP of Technology and cross functionally collaborate closely with brilliant leaders and technologists, top-tier development teams and work with cutting-edge technologies across product, architecture, infrastructure, and AI to bring advanced, intelligent capabilities to life for millions of enterprise learners.
Key Responsibilities:
Platform Architecture and AI Development & Innovation
- Lead the architectural transformation of the Skillsoft’s Learning Platform, designing and implementing modern, cloud-native, AI-first architecture patterns
- Oversee the architectural process, championing the integration of cutting-edge AI technologies and generative AI workflows into core platform architecture including driving the architectural evolution of our microservices and event-driven backend platform to support AI-powered workflows, reporting, and interoperability
- Leveraging LLMs, skills and knowledge graphs… architect, implement, and champion the integration of AI-powered features across backend systems to drive automation, intelligent insights and adaptive personalized learning recommendations
- Drive technology strategy for the complete platform ecosystem, balancing innovation with reliability and scalability requirements; Technical Vision to Implementation
Strategic Leadership
- Translate product vision into detailed software architecture and technical roadmaps, ensuring alignment between business objectives and technical execution
- Hands-on involvement in critical architectural decisions, including product design reviews, proof-of-concepts, and technical spike work
- Lead technical innovation initiatives including evaluation, prototyping, and adoption of emerging AI technologies and development frameworks
- Oversee the backend platform engineering roadmap in alignment with product and enterprise integration strategies
- Lead technical execution for platform admin functions, HRIS/LMS integrations, data systems, and content pipelines
- Collaborate across executive leadership to ensure backend systems enable innovation while delivering scalability, reliability, and extensibility
- Manage engineering roadmap to align with product goals and support company strategy by working closely with executive leadership
- Work with product management to leverage new technologies to develop learner platform capabilities and AI innovation, balancing speed, quality, and technical debt
Product Development and Delivery
- Lead globally distributed teams through the full development lifecycle using agile-at-scale practices, ensuring timely delivery of secure, performant, and maintainable software
- Collaborate with product, design, AI, and infrastructure teams to build backend features that directly support learning and talent development goals
- Balance delivery speed with architectural integrity and proactive technical debt management
Team Culture and Leadership
- Build and mentor high-performing, empowered engineering teams across geographies
- Foster a culture of technical excellence, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous improvement
- Lead through change and ambiguity with transparency and decisiveness
Customer and Stakeholder Engagement
- Partner with Customer Success, Professional Services, and Support teams to ensure product capabilities meet enterprise-grade performance and reliability needs
- Engage with customers and partners to understand backend requirements and validate architectural decisions
Skills & Experience Required:
- Minimum of 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with 8+ years in senior leadership roles, including 5+ years a principal architect or technical lead on a large-scale platform
- Proven success in delivering scalable SaaS systems and enterprise-grade integrations (Experience in learning platforms, data platforms, or cloud-native AI systems preferred)
- Experience leading large, globally distributed engineering teams of 100+ direct and indirect reports as a player/coach
- Skilled in agile-at-scale delivery (e.g., SAFe), CI/CD, incident management, security, and performance optimization
- Technical Expertise: Deep knowledge of backend architectures, microservices, data pipelines, APIs, and enterprise integration patterns with strong grounding in cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), containerization, DevOps, and observability. Experience integrating LLMs and generative AI into backend workflows
- Strategic Vision & Business Impact: Track record of aligning engineering strategy with business goals to accelerate innovation, enhance customer outcomes, and drive growth
- Customer Centric Product Thinking: Ability to translate user insights and data into intuitive product experiences that delight users/customers and achieve measurable outcomes. Passionate about delivering value through elegant design, usability, accessibility, and personalization for diverse enterprise learners
- Data Driven Decision Making: Strong understanding of data modeling, streaming, warehousing, and API-first design. Expertise in using platform analytics, A/B testing, and engineering metrics (DORA) to drive continuous improvement, performance optimization, and measurable business results
- Executive Presence & Communication: Excellent communicator with the ability to influence across product, design, data science, and executive leadership teams. Comfortable representing engineering in customer-facing and board-level discussions
- Location: Greater Boston, Massachusetts Area
Preferred Qualifications:
- M.S. or MBA or advanced degree in business, technology, or a related field
- Experience working in fast-paced global, matrixed organizations
Target base salary range for this job requisition is anticipated to be approximately $280,000 - $320,000 annually.
We also offer Enterprise benefits including but not limited to: medical, dental, vision, and paid time off.
The company may modify salaries, salary ranges and/or Pay Plans from time to time as it deems necessary.
Skillsoft delivers online learning, training, and talent solutions to help organizations unleash their edge. Leveraging immersive, engaging content, Skillsoft enables organizations to unlock the potential in their best assets – their people – and build teams with the skills they need for success. Empowering 36 million learners and counting, Skillsoft democratizes learning through an intelligent learning experience and a customized, learner-centric approach to skills development with resources for Leadership Development, Business Skills, Technology & Development, Digital Transformation, and Compliance.
Skillsoft is partner to thousands of leading global organizations, including many Fortune 500 companies. The company features three award-winning systems that support learning, performance and success: Skillsoft learning content, the Percipio intelligent learning experience platform, which offers measurable impact across the entire employee lifecycle. Learn more at www.skillsoft.com.
Thank you for taking the time to learn more about us.
If this opportunity intrigues you, we would love for you to apply!
NOTE TO EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES: We value the partnerships we have built with our preferred vendors. Skillsoft does not accept unsolicited resumes from employment agencies. All resumes submitted by employment agencies directly to any Skillsoft employee or hiring manager in any form without a signed Skillsoft Employment Agency Agreement on file and search engagement for that position will be deemed unsolicited in nature. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is subsequently hired as a result of the referral or through other means.
Skillsoft is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information, and other legally protected categories.
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