Lead Software Engineer

Impact the Moment

We're looking for a Lead Software Engineer at McGraw Hill who thrives on solving problems, exhibits independent creativity, embraces curiosity, and builds strong partnerships with cross-functional teams. If you can balance the art of delivering iterative value to our customers with the science of high-quality engineering, we'd love to hear from you.

As a Lead Software Engineer, you'll directly influence the success of our platforms by combining hands-on technical contributions, thoughtful leadership, and a deep understanding of customer needs. You'll help shape the future of education by building tools and experiences that serve millions of learners and educators every day

Your Impact on the Team

We're looking for people who like problem solving, exhibit independent creativity, and function cooperatively on a team. As a team member at McGraw Hill, you have a sense of personal accountability, a curiosity to research new technologies and methodologies, and a pervasive desire to dig into complex issues while respecting timelines and team commitments. By building the next set of platform capabilities and a wealth of interactive and engaging digital resources, you will support instruction for our newest programs and products at McGraw Hill.

At McGraw Hill, a team's engineers look up to, admire, and trust their lead. Leads contribute directly to the codebase and mentor other team members. They have a strong desire and motivation to grow the individuals on their team and the team as a whole. Leads are opinionated and back up their opinions with data and experience. Leads are advocates for their team members and have as much interest on individual successes on the team as they do of the team's success. Leads build trust by fostering a welcome, supportive, and humble environment, not through dictation, arrogance, or brute force.

We believe leads function best when they can focus on their team and technology and not be burdened with "traditional" management responsibilities, so our leads do not have direct reports. We foster career growth, so if it turns out you want to manage people, we can make it work!

As your hands-on contributions, you will build front-end web interfaces and back-end application code and APIs across our portfolio. This is a "full stack" role, so we are looking for people with experience in both front-end and back-end modern web development.

This is a remote position open to applicants within the United States.

What You'll Do:

• Work with a team of individual contributors to build our web applications (front-end and back-end). This will include building new applications, making major product updates and maintaining existing applications.
• Lead and influence a distributed team to solve problems quickly and collaboratively.
• Mentor junior engineers to help grow their professional careers.
• Work with leadership, product, SRE and others to plan systems and solutions.
• Collaborate with your partner product and program leaders to push projects forward by removing obstacles, think beyond the MVP and clearly communicate to stakeholders and team members.
• Contribute to CI/CD, customer support and production support processes.

About You

• You have led a team of individual contributor engineers, having come from an engineering background yourself. You have empathy for engineers and balance that with the realities of the business. Your desire to lead is intrinsic; you aren't chasing a title or feel you "have" to be a lead because a career path forces it.
• You're a decisive leader who can balance long-term goals with short-term delivery, focusing on iterative development to deliver customer value incrementally.
• You're an empathetic collaborator who actively partners with other departments to build shared success.
• You thrive in hands-on environments, learning new technologies and problem-solving with curiosity and urgency.
• You think like a customer, understanding their pain points, and wear a "product hat" in technical discussions. You believe in understanding why work is being done and empathizing with the users, not just implementing code and moving onto the next task.
• You build front ends with the needs of our users in mind, partnering with our UX team members to build the best experiences for our teachers, students, and other personas.
• You have a track record of managing and delivering complex projects, ensuring alignment between timelines, quality, and customer expectations.
• You lead with a humble, supportive approach, inspiring confidence and trust in your team.
• You consider the need for accessible designs in all steps of the engineering process for those with visual, auditory, sensory, cognitive, and other considerations.
• You communicate technical concepts effectively with diverse stakeholders, from engineering to business teams.
• Alignment to our stack (described further in this posting) is nice, but diversity of experience is better.

Our Stack

We have a very diverse stack that can vary across teams and projects. Some of the technologies we use include:

• Back-end: Node.js, Go, Java, PHP
• Front-end: TypeScript, Angular, NgRx/RxJS, React
• CI/CD and Infrastructure: CircleCI, Sonarqube, Docker, Kubernetes, Github and NewRelic
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): EKS, RDS, Lambda, and many other services
• Collaboration: JIRA, Confluence, Zoom, Slack, and Office 365
• Databases: Relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL; NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB

Required:

• Proficiency in at least one of the above back-end technologies
• Proficiency in at least one of the above front-end technologies
• Proficiency in at least one of the above databases

Preferred:

• Experience with AWS, Docker
• Experience influencing engineers in large, matrixed organizations

Why McGraw Hill?

• We firmly believe in the mission of educating students and helping them succeed.
• Our teams operate in a collaborative and safe environment where everyone's input is valued, trusted, and respected. We want to know what you think; we don't want "feature farms"!
• You'll have the opportunity for horizontal and vertical movement and growth throughout the organization, including clear career paths for your long term personal and professional growth. We hire good people rather than filling team vacancies or checking boxes for technical skillsets.
• We have a mindset of "deliver value, not features" - we produce meaningful products and services for our students, teachers, administrators, and others that further our educational mission rather than focus on just executing a JIRA ticket number.

Why work for us?

The work you do at McGraw Hill will be work that matters. We are collectively designing content that will build the future of education. Play your part and experience a sense of fulfilment that will inspire you to even greater heights.

The pay range for this position is between $124,350 - $180,000 annually, however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location.An annual bonus plan may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical and/or other benefits, depending on the position offered. Clickhereto learn more about our benefit offerings.

McGraw Hill recruiters always use a "@mheducation.com" email address and/or from our Applicant Tracking System, iCIMS. Any variation of this email domain should be considered suspicious. Additionally, McGraw Hill recruiters and authorized representatives will never request sensitive information in email.