Director of Product Engineering

Essential Functions

• Partner with the Hub Product Manager to set and maintain the product roadmap, balancing speed, risk, and the operational realities of phased school rollouts.
• 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 across the organization.
• Drive customer discovery and voice-of-customer practices into the product engineering operating model, ensuring what gets built reflects real customer needs.
• Embed AI coding assistants, such as Claude Code, into standard engineering workflows to accelerate code generation and delivery.
• Develop and maintain central prompt libraries, usage patterns, and governance guardrails for utilizing AI development tools effectively.
• Design automated pipeline checks and mandatory review gates tailored specifically to catch formatting errors or logic flaws generated by AI assistants before code merges.
• Assess and refine the impact of AI tools on engineering velocity and quality, adjusting workflows to keep delivery speed high while maintaining technical rigor.
• Enforce automated security scanning, SOC 2 control mappings, and FERPA-aware data checks as non-negotiable hard gates within all deployment pipelines.
• Block releases when security, privacy, or compliance controls fail, and drive timely remediation to restore the deployment pipeline.
• Partner with the Security and Data Engineering teams to accurately map and secure sensitive student data flows across all custom application environments.
• Write infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines personally for Hub using Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Azure-native services, especially for the critical paths during early phases.
• Configure and provision cloud environments directly, implementing release management, environment promotion, and rollback mechanisms for Hub deployments.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues hands-on when they arise, modeling the engineering depth expected from the team.
• Evaluate and integrate third-party managed services defaulting to vendor solutions over dedicating engineering hours to custom platform builds.
• Architect and lead the integration patterns connecting Vertex Hub to operational platforms across the business, ensuring data flows, identity handling, and event-driven exchanges are durable and secure.

Required Qualifications

• Significant tenure in software engineering, with at least 5 years owning product engineering or platform engineering as a hands-on player-coach, including 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.