Director of Product Engineering

Vertex Education•Chandler, AZ

About The Position

Vertex Education is seeking a Director of Product Engineering, DevOps and Platform to own the Vertex Hub product end-to-end. This role involves leading the Hub Product Manager and founding engineer, setting product direction in partnership with the PM, leading engineering efforts, and writing critical code. The position requires establishing foundational engineering practices like CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and ensuring SOC 2 and FERPA compliance. The focus is on delivering measurable value to customers rather than solely building a platform engineering practice. The role requires stage-appropriate judgment, balancing rigor for safe launches with lean practices to avoid premature development.

Requirements

Significant tenure in software engineering.
At least 5 years owning product engineering or platform engineering as a hands-on player-coach.
Direct ownership of customer-facing products.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating integrations between custom products and enterprise SaaS platforms, including identity, data synchronization, and event-driven patterns.
Demonstrated hands-on expertise building fully automated, zero-touch CI/CD pipelines utilizing GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps from scratch.
Strong production experience writing infrastructure-as-code, such as Terraform, to replace manual provisioning with strict, version-controlled cloud environments.
Proven track record enforcing automated security and compliance gates (SOC 2, FERPA) natively within the deployment process, with a demonstrated willingness to block non-compliant releases.
Hands-on experience operationalizing AI coding assistants (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or similar) into daily routines to accelerate delivery speed while utilizing automated review gates to catch generated errors.
Production expertise managing containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes or similar) to ensure highly reliable custom applications.
History of successfully procuring, integrating, and standardizing managed developer tools and observability platforms (Datadog, Sentry or similar) instead of dedicating engineering hours to bespoke internal builds.
Experience managing external development agencies or contractors, holding them accountable to strict internal architecture, deployment, and security standards.

Nice To Haves

Background in education, healthtech, or fintech SaaS with direct exposure to navigating highly regulated data environments.
Proven success untangling early, fragmented tooling ecosystems and establishing robust continuous delivery rails where none previously existed.
Experience establishing API and event-driven integration patterns alongside data engineering teams (Snowflake, dbt or similar) and enterprise SaaS platforms (HubSpot, Workday, PowerSchool or similar).
Strong track record of technical leadership, mentoring engineers through complex infrastructure work and accelerating internal capability.
Track record of partnering closely with product management on customer-facing software products, owning joint delivery commitments and product-level outcomes (adoption, retention, defect escape rate) alongside engineering metrics.

Responsibilities

Partner with the Hub Product Manager to set and maintain the product roadmap, balancing speed, risk, and operational realities.
Translate Hub’s strategic vision into shipped capability that creates measurable value for schools, parents, and Vertex’s growth plan.
Define and own the success metrics for Hub (adoption, engagement, reliability) and report them consistently to leadership.
Drive cross-functional alignment with Service Experience, Enrollment, school operations, and Data Engineering to ensure Hub releases land cleanly.
Drive customer discovery and voice-of-customer practices into the product engineering operating model.
Embed AI coding assistants into standard engineering workflows to accelerate code generation and delivery.
Develop and maintain central prompt libraries, usage patterns, and governance guardrails for AI development tools.
Design automated pipeline checks and mandatory review gates for AI-generated code.
Assess and refine the impact of AI tools on engineering velocity and quality.
Enforce automated security scanning, SOC 2 control mappings, and FERPA-aware data checks as non-negotiable hard gates within deployment pipelines.
Block releases when security, privacy, or compliance controls fail and drive timely remediation.
Partner with Security and Data Engineering teams to accurately map and secure sensitive student data flows.
Write infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines personally for Hub using Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Azure-native services.
Configure and provision cloud environments directly, implementing release management, environment promotion, and rollback mechanisms.
Troubleshoot complex production issues hands-on.
Evaluate and integrate third-party managed services, defaulting to vendor solutions.
Architect and lead integration patterns connecting Vertex Hub to operational platforms.
Lead the Hub Product Manager and founding Hub engineer, establishing clear roles, performance expectations, and growth paths.
Identify and execute on hiring needs based on the Hub scale plan.
Establish engineering practices (release process, on-call model, code review standards, AI tooling adoption) that scale with the team.
Mentor through daily code reviews and direct technical guidance.