{"id":1331248,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cengage-vp-software-engineering-core-systems","title":"VP, Software Engineering - Core Systems","company":{"id":5721,"name":"Cengage","domain":"cengage.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cengage","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":18,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":192500,"max":308000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":308000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":15,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Incident Management","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-09-30T11:23:01Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":6},"description":"We believe in the power and joy of learning\nAt Cengage, our employees have a direct impact in helping learners around the world discover the power and joy of learning. We are bonded by our shared purpose - driving innovation that helps millions of learners improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education.\nWhat you'll do here:\nAs Vice President, Core Systems within Product Technology in the Digital organization, you will lead the organization responsible for shared technology capabilities that enable Cengage’s digital products to scale across multiple markets and future verticals.\nThis role serves as a critical member of Digital Technology leadership team, partnering closely with leaders across Higher Education, School, English Language Learning and Work. You will guide teams dedicated to shared core capabilities and advance Cengage’s Core Systems strategy. You will build, buy oar partner to implement reusable capabilities once and scale them across vertical solutions. Business units will tailor the last mile for their specific markets and customers.\nYou will partner closely with teams in Digital Product, Technology, DevOps, Information Security, IT operations to modernize our technology ecosystem, reduce platform complexity, improve reliability, accelerate delivery, and enable AI-powered learning experiences for learners, instructors, institutions, and workforce customers.\nYou are a collaborative and pragmatic technology leader. You can build high-performing distributed teams and lead sophisticated modernization work. You operate effectively across product, platform, content, and key collaborators. You are expected to use data, customer insight, engineering judgment, and operational metrics to prioritize work and improve outcomes for learners, instructors, internal teams, and business partners.\nResponsibilities\nOwn the technology strategy, roadmap, and operating model for the core systems in support of the Product Technology strategy and Cengage’s enterprise product priorities.\n\nAdvance the “build once, scale everywhere” strategy by creating reusable capabilities that improve scalability, reduce duplication, increase consistency, and accelerate speed to market.\n\nDrive modernization of Core Systems through generative AI technologies, cloud-native architecture, API-first integration, service simplification, automation, observability, and retirement or consolidation of legacy capabilities. Lead consolidation efforts across technology domains, including search and discovery, entitlements and license management, assessment services, data platforms, and other shared capabilities.\n\nEstablish shared AI infrastructure, data, retrieval, observability, safety, and platform services that enable product teams to create smart, adaptive learning experiences responsibly and efficiently.\n\nPartner with product and business leaders to increase the adoption of shared capabilities, while ensuring each business unit can tailor experiences for its market needs. Partner with Security, Privacy, Legal, and Compliance teams to ensure Core Systems support data protection, retention, obfuscation, auditability, academic integrity, and global privacy requirements.\n\nDrive operational excellence through strong engineering practices, automation, CI/CD, observability, incident management, workload forecasting, and service level agreements. Build, develop, and mentor a high-performing engineering leadership team, with talent pipelines and succession plans, fostering accountability, transparency, technical excellence, inclusion, and continuous improvement. Champion modern software delivery practices, AI-enabled development workflows, test automation, secure development, and disciplined portfolio execution.\n\nEvaluate and recommend build, buy, and partner options for Core Systems capabilities, balancing strategic differentiation, cost, speed, risk, interoperability, and long-term ownership. Create financial and operational transparency for shared services, including cost allocation, platform usage, product-level cost visibility, reliability metrics, and Core Systems investment tradeoffs.\n\nSkills you will need here\nRequired\n15+ years of software, platform, or enterprise technology experience, including substantial leadership of shared services or platform engineering organizations.\n\n8+ years of senior engineering leadership experience, including leading leaders and geographically distributed teams across multiple domains, systems, and time zones.\n\nExperience defining and executing platform or shared-services strategies across complex product portfolios\n\nExperience running high-availability enterprise systems with clear reliability targets, incident management practices, oversight of system performance, and service-level accountability.\n\nExperience leading AI-enabled product platforms, personalization services, intelligent search, learning analytics, or enterprise data capabilities.\n\nExperience modernizing legacy platforms, monolithic systems, and fragmented technology ecosystems into scalable, cloud-native, modular architectures.\n\nDemonstrated success leading consolidation and simplification efforts that reduce technical debt, operational burden, platform duplication, and cost.\n\nExperience managing budgets, vendor relationships, platform investment tradeoffs, and cost optimization within a large-scale technology portfolio.\n\nExcellent executive communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders, align senior leaders, and make complex technology strategy understandable.\n\nStrong organizational leadership skills, including talent development, succession planning, culture building, performance management, and leadership of leaders.\n\nPreferred\nExperience in education technology, digital learning platforms, publishing, content platforms, assessment platforms, or other sophisticated digital product ecosystems.\n\nDeep understanding of cloud-native engineering practices, including AWS, data platforms, AI infrastructure, retrieval-augmented generation, responsible AI controls, security, privacy, auditability, and operational monitoring, event-driven architecture, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automated testing, and observability.\n\nCengage is committed to working with broad talent pools to attract and hire strong and most qualified individuals. Our job applicants are considered regardless of any classification protected by applicable federal, state, provincial or local laws.\nCengage is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities including during our job application process. If you are an applicant with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in our job application process, please contact us at .\nAbout Cengage\nCengage, a global education technology company serving millions of learners, provides affordable, quality digital products and services that equip students with the skills and competencies needed to be job ready. For more than 100 years, we have enabled the power and joy of learning with trusted, engaging content, and now, integrated digital platforms. We serve the higher education, workforce skills, secondary education, English language teaching and research markets worldwide. Through our scalable technology, including MindTap and Cengage Unlimited, we support all learners who seek to improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education.\nCompensation\nAt Cengage Group, we take great pride in our commitment to providing a comprehensive and rewarding Total Rewards package designed to support and empower our employees. Click here to learn more about our Total Rewards Philosophy.\nThe full base pay range has been provided for this position. Individual base pay will vary based on work schedule, qualifications, experience, internal equity, and geographic location. Sales roles often incorporate a significant incentive compensation program beyond this base pay range.\nIn this position, you will be eligible to participate in the company’s discretionary incentive bonus program. This position's bonus target amount, which is not guaranteed and is dependent on individual performance and overall company results among other factors, is provided below.\n35% Annual: Individual Target$192,500.00 - $308,000.00 USD","description_format":"text","description_chars":8361,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":15,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Education","Higher Education"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-27T09:54:21Z"}],"liveness":{"score":62,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.621,"p_room":1,"age_days":6,"expected_fill_days":27,"reasons":["conf:18","stale_co","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":308000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cengage-vp-software-engineering-core-systems","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cengage-vp-software-engineering-core-systems.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T12:22:23Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3738,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":1262,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}