Seeking a VP of Engineering

A fast paced and complex technology environment needs a strong organizational and technical leader, and that's were you come in.

About Teaching Strategies, LLC

Teaching Strategies is a dynamic early childhood education company that provides the most innovative and effective curriculum, assessment, professional development, and family connection resources to programs serving children from birth through kindergarten. With ground-breaking solutions and a strong belief that the most powerful way to impact child outcomes is to improve teacher effectiveness, Teaching Strategies has been supporting the critical work of early childhood educators for over 25 years.

As a company, our philosophy is that the best outcomes result from working together as a team. Located in downtown Bethesda, MD, our company's headquarters are within steps from Bethesda Row and the Bethesda Metro stop. Candidates who fit with our values, vision, and mission will find a casual and fun work environment that fosters creativity, innovation and career growth. Along with great benefits and competitive compensation packages, we at Teaching Strategies pride ourselves on the impact we have on the early childhood field through supporting teachers who are doing the most important work there is teaching children to become creative, confident thinkers.

Job Responsibilities

As Vice President (VP) of Engineering, you will own the delivery of the product roadmap for Teaching Strategies. You will be responsible for developing an engineering team, creating product architecture, and deploying development processes that address current business challenges and anticipates the future direction of the business and the industry.

You will drive the engineering organization (Development, test, DevOps and Technical Operations) towards industry best practices so that we can create innovative, maintainable, and high-quality products that best solve our market and clients' needs.

How? You will be a hands-on leader, hiring the best candidates and coaching the team on the right ways to engineer software, both strategically and tactically. You also like to roll up your sleeves and dive in and do whatever it takes to get the job done, whenever necessary and appropriate. You will collaborate with the Product Management, Customer Support, Corporate IT and Business Operation to deliver high business value features while maintaining secured, robust, high performance and scalable product.

Expected Results

• Collaborate on the product strategy and roadmap with product management and deliver on your commitments in partnership with Product Management, Product Support, Corporate IT, and Business Operations.
• Create an architectural vision and technical roadmap that supports the efficient delivery on the product strategy and product roadmap, within the first 60 days.
• Define release schedules for the portfolio of products and internal systems within the first 45 days, accounting for existing technical debt, development bottlenecks, cost optimization, and quality goals. Successfully deliver on the plan releasing innovative, compelling, useful and usable products on a regular cadence with high quality.
• Lead and manage the team to deliver innovation and high-quality user and business value as quickly as possible, leveraging effective coaching, continuous performance management, and recruiting the best people. Communicate an execution plan in the first 75 days.
• Build an efficient, accountable and productive engineering organization and system based on agile development practices, continuously ensuring that execution and quality is kept high and trending forward by establishing a baseline and success metrics.
• Contribute to the definition and execution of the business strategy by collaborating with other roles (e.g. Product Management, Services and Support) across the organization, receiving positive feedback on your interactions.

Qualifications

The VP Engineering at Teaching Strategies must be an execution guru with deep technical skills and solid people, business, and organizational capabilities. Are you that person?

Technical Skills

• A deep understanding of functional and non-functional requirements for commercial, mission-critical enterprise software products and services.
• Experience developing and delivering Cloud Services on platform like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or using platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) such Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
• Demonstrated results with SaaS, N-Tier architectures, application servers, web frameworks, databases and data warehouses, analytics, and RESTful web services.
• Domain expertise in .Net, Open Source, and cloud technologies like microservices, NodeJs, SQL and NoSQL platforms, containerization, user-interface technologies like Angular, ReactJS and analytics technologies like Splunk, Elasticsearch, Kibana.
• Experience with multiple development methodologies such as agile or Test-Driven Development.
• Demonstrated knowledge and experience with quality practices such as unit testing, code reviews, test automation, code coverage, static analysis and continuous integration and delivery.
• Realtime high performance system analysis and benchmarking

Personal

• An immense passion for undertaking and delivering on huge and exciting challenges, and continuously improving a team.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills that allow you to speak and present to the entire organization, ranging from the CEO to the engineers.
• The ability to successfully negotiate ambiguity in a fast-paced dynamic environment. You have intelligent risk-taking tendencies - you are not afraid to fail, but fail fast, and learn from the mistakes, making everyone around you better for it.
• An ability to accurately and objectively assess technical and personal strengths/weaknesses.
• Ability to manage large-scale, aggressive, and dynamic technical projects with competing resources and priorities.
• Strong analytic and quantitative analysis skills with demonstrable ability to break down complex problems into phased deliverables with strong attention to detail.

Experience

• 15+ years of experience in enterprise software design and development, with a proven track record of delivering.
• 10+ years in leadership or management roles.
• 7+ years in hands-on programming and architecture design for variety of enterprise software applications, with a proven track record of shipping products and solutions.
• Childhood education products experience or exposure is a plus
• Successful market launch and ongoing management and understand the end-to-end needs and potential pitfalls related to new offerings.
• Global software experience is a plus.
• Agile Methodology work experience is preferred.
• Demonstrated successful delivery of high quality technology products/services in a very high growth environment where priorities shift rapidly.
• Demonstrated ability to conceptualize, manage, and prioritize multiple projects
• Demonstrated ability to formulate data driven decisions that lead to results
• Ability to prioritize well, communicate clearly and understands how to drive a high level of focus and excellence with a strong, talented, opinionated team
• Experience driving a technical global product and team with end to end inbound and outbound product responsibilities
• Sound business judgment, proven ability to collaborate, influence others, and strong analytical thinking skills

Education

• Bachelor Degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Mathematics, advanced degree preferred

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