The Role: 

As the Director of Software Engineering, Applications you will mentor Team Leads to cultivate a healthy development culture across teams and nurture solid technical foundations in the creation of a product that excels in meeting the needs of teachers and students. You’ll help lead your team to work on big problems in literacy education, from building the infrastructure necessary to handle tens of millions of users to solving novel problems in text complexity and personalization. You’ll also be instrumental in building an engineering culture that values teaching, learning, and questioning. You’ll continue to build our culture of learning by providing close mentorship to your team of developers as needed, and regular one-on-one’s, all to ensure you’re growing your team’s technical skills and interests.

Why You’ll Love This Role: 

Students, learning engagement, and education: the pillars that we are building our applications around are a big deal. We don’t intend to make bad software. We design detailed software that user’s love. Reporting to the Vice President of Software Engineering, Applications, you will be part of a highly collaborative interdisciplinary team, and will be an equal partner of Product and Design in the creation of compelling products. This role gets you flexing your product and design skills, as well as your expertise in software development and mentorship. You’ll help lead a team that designs solutions as well as builds them; you will be shaping the product to ensure that beautifully designed features are shipped to Newsela’s national user base.

Why We’ll Love You:  

With 10+ years experience in web-focused engineering and clear experience in engineering leadership, you have a successful history of building design-detailed, highly usable products. You have proven experience leading the design and implementation, with knowledge of web standards and protocols, an in-depth knowledge of browser and system architectures, and a passion for mentoring engineers. You possess the ability to have a certain amount of rigor in the user experience to truly meet the user’s needs. You can defend the intention of the product and the needs of the users, and are empathetic to not just your peers but teachers and students. You also have empathy for the wide variety of devices that anyone may choose to use. We don’t get to decide what device or browser that users choose, so we build software that is understanding of that spectrum, performant and usable on every device. You’re also an effective technical leader, who inspires your team to prioritize healthy software development practices and quality code.

About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.