Head of Engineering - Remote

Overview

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’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.

In Short

• 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 cross-functionally 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, dev-ops, 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, dev-ops, 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.

Requirements

• 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.