Head of Engineering

Who we are

We’re an early stage, funded edtech nonprofit on a mission to eradicate illiteracy in America. Our team is composed of former educators, literacy curriculum experts, and product developers who believe it is possible to teach every child to read, and to do so at scale via research-based instruction, personalization, and technology. We center students in all decisions, in particular Black, Latino, Native American, and those experiencing poverty.

We’re building an integrated, comprehensive, tech-enabled pre-kindergarten through 8th grade reading product that students love and that rapidly moves them to foundational literacy and reading fluency. We are looking for a Head of Engineering to lead our software development efforts and build our early prototyping work to a complete PK-8 product that achieves scale, efficacy, and market success.

This is an opportunity to join as a senior leader in a mission-driven organization, working to build a breakthrough reading solution for historically underserved students. You’ll bring technical leadership expertise, a deep commitment to equity in education, and the ability to manage through complexity while driving cross-functional collaboration with key partners across our product, growth, and academic & research teams.

Challenges you’ll get to take on

• You will set and lead the organization’s technical vision and engineering roadmap for an integrated, personalized, research-based, student-led PK-8 digital foundational literacy tool. 
• You’ll partner closely with the CEO, Head of Product, and Head of Academics to deliver on an ambitious product vision and translate the product roadmap into a technical roadmap and strategy.
• You’ll contribute to the development and refinement of the product roadmap, and lead the engineering department’s inception processes to plan development and delivery.
• You’ll recruit, build, and manage a lean team of diverse engineering staff and contractors to implement the technical strategy. 
• You’ll ensure that clear roles, processes and controls are established within engineering and crossfunctionally involving engineering to ensure we develop maturity and efficiency with our core work.
• You’ll oversee the entire engineering department and its functions, including game development, assessment, recommendation engine, QA, architecture, devops, and information security. 
• You'll lead the organization's technical design and build decisions, ensuring we make clear, simple, appropriately versatile, scalable, and overall strategically sound choices related to engineering team management/culture, development methods, requirements/specification approach, software design, architecture, technology stack, data structures, algorithms, devops, data protection, security, licensing, and integrating other technologies.
• You will lead the technical development as we develop prototypes into minimum sellable products and then fully scaled, commercially successful and efficacious products, beginning with our K-2 instructional tool with integrated assessment. You’ll ensure the technology enhances the user experience vs. gets in the way, even at the earliest stages.
• You will be primarily responsible for critical build vs buy decisions and integrating complex existing technology components and solutions  (i.e. speech recognition and handwriting recognition) seamlessly into the user experience.
• You will lead the design of a highly instrumented recommendation engine that returns and responds to a continuous data stream of user choice, experience, performance, customizations, and a highly responsive user interface. This recommendation engine will provide researchers and designers with critical data that will be used to improve all desirable outcomes of the system over time and provide immediate insight into student progress, barriers, and achievement as well as which elements of the product need further optimization. 
• You'll oversee our information security efforts, working closely with our Data Privacy Officer. You'll develop and implement data recovery and IT security failure plans and audits to get ahead of potential vulnerabilities and noncompliance situations.
• You’ll ensure the maintenance of rigorous documentation of engineering practices, strategies and architectures so that we can scale efficiently and effectively over time and continuously improve.
• You’ll oversee engineering teams and processes, prioritizing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and adaptability, while proactively adjusting workflows and strategies to align with changing implementation requirements.
• You’ll ensure we are building collaborative DNA across the team by closely partnering with other senior leaders, bringing technology expertise to all of our focus areas.

• As a senior and founding leader of our team you’ll help drive the vision and direction-setting for the organization and inspire and motivate the team to persevere through and learn from the many challenges along the way.

• You’ll ensure we are leveraging an inclusive R&D process, seeking diverse perspectives, and prioritizing Black, Latino and Native students and those experiencing poverty in all technical decisions.

• You’ll directly manage a team and ensure their individual and collective ongoing learning, development and growth.

Requirements

This job is for you if:

• You have a proven track record leading high-performing engineering teams, even better in an education context. You've set a technology vision and led an engineering team to execute on the technical roadmap.
• You have 10+ years of experience in engineering leadership roles, managing teams of 20+ engineers across multiple engineering domains. 
• You have extensive experience implementing QA strategies, including TDD, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines.
• You have experience with cloud-native platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.), microservices, containerization, and scalable data pipelines.
• You’ve taken something from its earliest conceptual stages to scale. You’ve experienced and love the fast-paced, fail-forward startup environment.
• You have experience building and scaling engineering teams, managing toward results, ideally in a remote environment.
• You have a track record of collaborating and communicating effectively with non-technical content, design, executive, and product staff.
• We prefer that you have extensive experience in one or more of the following areas:
• Experience leading A/B testing strategy and implementation
• Experience designing, implementing, and optimizing machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Strong understanding of ML frameworks, model development, and deployment pipelines. Familiarity with MLOps practices. Experience with cloud-based AI/ML services and ethical AI considerations such as bias detection and explainability is highly desirable.
• Highly responsive and customizable UX design and implementation
• Experience creating modular software designs
• Understanding of common Edtech systems such as SIS, LMS, CRM. 
• Familiarity with common Edtech standards and protocols like SIF, Ed-Fi, OneRoster, QTI, LTI, and Caliper.
• Deep understanding of the laws, requirements and industry best practices that protect student data privacy such as FERPA, COPPA. Understanding of cybersecurity industry standards and best practices such as NIST.
• An understanding of highly adaptive, personalized learning and assessment architectures that respond in real time to user input and performance.
• You understand technology trends, ideally as they relate to ed tech, and can align our decisions and strategy to the most important innovations and macro-trends. You have up-to-date knowledge of cloud computing services, relevant open source projects, and emerging technologies.
• You are intuitive and action-oriented, but are willing to give up bad ideas quickly. You have “strong opinions, weakly held” and use cycles of hypothesis-driven data validation to move forward in contexts of low information. You embrace the agile methodology, MVP prototyping, and placing little bets.
• Your super power is simplifying complexity. You recognize patterns and are an extremely logical thinker and communicator. You can explain technical approaches to non-technical audiences, and particularly to product-development and executive management partners.
• You are a results-driven leader who fosters a high-performance, humane culture.
• You are mission-driven and believe deeply in the transformative power reading has for historically marginalized and underserved student populations. You are committed to building a product with and for priority student groups, specifically Black, Latino and Native students and those experiencing poverty.
• You have a demonstrated commitment to anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion and justice and are known as an inspiring leader of diverse teams.
• You have a high degree of emotional intelligence, self-awareness and a relationship-orientation that inspires and motivates others.
• You are able to effectively work in a remote environment, using technology (Zoom, Slack, Google suite, Asana) to collaborate and are able to travel up to 10% for in-person team meetings, retreats, prototyping and pilot visits, convenings and conferences when we are able to travel again.

Benefits

What You’ll Receive:

• Salary range of $240,000 - $260,000 annually
• Competitive medical, dental, vision benefits
• 401k with 4% guaranteed match
• Opportunity to work remotely for a mission-driven company full of change-makers
• Work environment that values balance and harmony with a deep commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion
• Opportunity to travel and meet your team members in-person 2x per year

We are on a mission to unlock the great reader in every child to end illiteracy in our country -- centering the experiences of Black, Latino, and Native American students and students experiencing poverty. We are developing research-based, identity-affirming PK-8+ digital literacy tools that leverage student uniquenesses to help every child master the foundational reading skills needed to become strong, confident readers. We’re currently hiring our founding team of mission-driven individuals committed to helping us develop a scalable, impactful reading product that helps us eradicate illiteracy in America.

Illuminate Literacy is fiscally sponsored by Cambiar Education, a 501c3 that supports transformative leaders of public school systems and educational entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions that disrupt the patterns of educational inequity.

Key Highlights

• Two fully digital prototypes built and currently being tested with a dozen schools and out-of-school partners; MVP kindergarten offering will be released fall 2023
• Fully-funded sister R&D organization, AERDF Reading Reimagined, to explore major unknowns in literacy learning for priority students and to bridge cutting-edge research to practice
• Founding team with deep expertise in teaching kids to read, on technology, at scale, comprised of literacy experts, practitioners, designers, engineers, and former education systems leaders. Founded and led by Rebecca Kockler, former Assistant Superintendent of Academic Content for the Louisiana Department of Education and developer of the nationally recognized ELA Guidebooks
• Extensive relationships with major systems leaders across the country requesting to be co-designers and first adopters; 100% retention of current partners year over year
• Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and to an inclusive R&D and product development approach that centers Black, Latino and Native American students and those experiencing poverty