VP, Software Engineering

McGraw Hill LLC. • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

23h • Remote

About The Position

McGraw-Hill's Higher Education engineering team builds products that millions of students and instructors rely on every day — courseware, adaptive learning, and the data systems that make personalized education possible at scale. This VP of Engineering role sits at the center of that work. The right candidate is ready to lead 100-200 engineers across a broad surface area of key initiatives. You'll lead experienced engineering directors across courseware delivery, data and personalization, and our Sharpen product area. You'll report directly to the SVP of Product Engineering and partner closely with product management, customer support, and our shared engineering platform and infrastructure teams. You will also work closely with Security, Data Engineering, and executive leadership to align technology investments with business priorities. The right leader also has experience with blending offshore and nearshore engineering talent with an onshore team, including vendor management. This is a role for someone who is energized by complexity, credible with engineers and product leaders alike, and genuinely motivated by the impact great technology can have on learning outcomes. This is a remote position open to applicants authorized to work for any employer within the United States.

Requirements

• Bachelors Degree (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience)
• 15+ years of professional experience, including at least 8 years in progressively senior engineering leadership roles.
• Superior financial acumen with the ability to drive efficient software engineering and operational practices while managing a budget of $20m+ and a staff of more than 150 professionals.
• Strong technical leadership in a product-engineering environment is required.
• Strong track record of delivering scaled software products to millions of users with at least $500m of annual revenue.
• Proven track record of superior tactical delivery in service of the business strategy.
• Proven experience in building, managing, and developing high-performing teams.
• Experience leading globally distributed teams, including offshore, nearshore, and vendor-managed organizations
• Keen business sense. Ability to communicate technical information in a clear and actionable way to non-technical stakeholders.
• Stay current on emerging software technologies and solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain strong customer relationships.
• Exceptional problem solving, analytic and diagnostic skills.
• Strong full-stack software background, with a focus on usability, accessibility, and scalability.
• Highly motivated, proactive, collaborative team player with the ability to persuade others and influence outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience in the EdTech industry, especially the Higher Ed market, is a significant plus.
• Prior experience with data driven products.
• Familiarity with adaptive learning, data/personalization platforms, or LMS ecosystems
• Experience leading engineering through a significant platform migration or modernization effort
• Deep experience within the media industry is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive engineering strategy
• Own the engineering strategy for your areas — not just as a planning exercise, but as a living framework that guides how your teams make decisions, prioritize technical investment, and evolve their systems over time.
• Understand where the business is going, translating it into a technical vision your teams can execute against, and making the hard calls about what to build, what to modernize, and what to leave behind.
• Partner with product leadership to ensure strategy is co-created, not handed off, and communicate it clearly enough that every engineer on your teams understands why their work matters.
• Lead and develop experienced engineering leaders
• Bring experience developing and leading directors and managers — people who run teams, make architectural decisions, and own outcomes.
• Sharpen their thinking, give them room to lead, create accountability structures that work, and invest in their growth with the same intention you'd want invested in your own.
• Set a high bar and help people reach it.
• Build leadership bench strength through succession planning and intentional development of future engineering leaders.
• Build systems for people to grow and thrive
• Be responsible for building the conditions that allow engineers at every level to do their best work — clear career paths, meaningful feedback loops, a culture of learning, and an environment where people feel challenged and supported in equal measure.
• Consider how your teams are structured, how work flows through them, how success is defined, and how people know they're growing.
• Recruit like it's a competitive sport
• Understand that the team you build is the most important thing you'll do in this role.
• Bring urgency and craft to hiring — know how to find great people, how to convey the mission, how to move fast without cutting corners on quality, and how to build a pipeline before you need it.
• Personally influence senior-level hiring decisions and ensure the organization has the leadership capability required to scale over time.
• Design organizations that scale
• Think carefully about how teams are structured — not just to reflect today's work, but to anticipate where the business is going.
• Make org design decisions deliberately, communicate them clearly, and revisit them as conditions change.
• Partner with product, sales and marketing — deeply and continuously
• Show up as a thought partner, not just an executor.
• Partner effectively with executive leadership, helping shape business strategy and ensuring technology investments support long-term company objectives.
• Co-own the roadmap, push back where needed, and make tradeoffs visible.
• Navigate shared engineering effectively
• Build strong working relationships across boundaries with platform, infrastructure, and shared services teams.
• Advocate for your teams' needs, and contribute to enterprise-wide engineering standards — not just consume them.
• Own your budget and spend it well
• Build reliable forecasts, make sound tradeoffs between headcount, tooling, and vendor spend, and keep your leaders honest about the real cost of technical decisions.
• Treat budget as a leadership responsibility — not an administrative one.
• Make a case for investment clearly and in business terms.

Benefits

• An annual bonus plan may be provided as part of the compensation package
• a full range of medical and/or other benefits, depending on the position offered.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive