Director of Product Engineering

Be the one who makes a difference!

At Vertex Education we are a team of high achievers, courageous leaders, and passionate believers in changing lives through education. As a purpose-led education services provider, our mission is destined to benefit many and yet it starts with just one person inspired to work together with us to make a memorable and meaningful difference for our clients, schools, students, and communities.  Be the one who makes a difference—with us.  

At Vertex Education, our mission of changing lives through education relies on building software that schools, parents, and students adopt and rely on. Vertex Hub is the first major custom product in our portfolio, with the first campuses going live in phases over the next year. As the Director of Product Engineering, DevOps and Platform within Central Services, you will own Hub end to end. You lead the Hub Product Manager and the founding Hub engineer as direct reports, partner with the PM to set product direction, lead the engineering work, and personally write the critical code paths that ship Hub. Engineering rails like CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and SOC 2 and FERPA compliance are necessary foundations you put in place, but the job is shipping a Hub that delivers measurable value to our customers, not building a platform engineering practice for its own sake. You operate with stage-appropriate judgment: rigorous enough to launch safely, lean enough to avoid building for users who don’t exist yet.

Essential Functions:

Vertex Hub Product Strategy & Direction:

• 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.

AI-Assisted Engineering Integration:

• 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.

Security, Compliance & Observability:

• 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.

Hands-On Engineering Delivery:

• 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.

Team Leadership: Product Manager & Engineering:

• Lead the Hub Product Manager and the founding Hub engineer as direct reports, with clear roles, performance expectations, and growth paths, treating product work and engineering work as a single operating model for Hub.

• Identify and execute on hiring needs based on the Hub scale plan, including any contractor or partner relationships required to support the rollout.

• Establish engineering practices (release process, on-call model, code review standards, AI tooling adoption) that scale with the team.

• Mentor through daily code reviews and direct technical guidance, modeling the standards you expect from the team.

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.

Be excited to be a part of our team and grow your career with us!​

Be the one who enables us to positively impact over 258,000 students across multiple states while driving our growth forward so we can enrich even more lives. Be the one who helps us achieve excellence for over 226 schools that we support with academics, finance, technology, human resources, communications, marketing, facilities, construction, and food services. Be the one who is a diverse thinker, a team player, a smart risk taker, an innovator, and a difference maker by encouraging others to climb higher and reach farther to further education.

• Be yourself surrounded by wonderful people who care about you, value your unique skills, and lift you up.

• Be supported in your work by caring leaders and team members who want you to succeed.

• Be empowered to make a difference and climb higher and reach farther to change lives through education.

• Be well in all aspects of your life from your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing to your finances.

• Enjoy industry-leading pay, rewards, referral bonuses, with unlimited flexible paid time-off for performance.

• Be able to care for your health and your family with comprehensive medical, dental and vision benefits and invest in your future with 401(k) plans with a 6% employer match on your contributions.

• Enhance your growth and development with mentoring and money to take training classes.

• Thrive in a welcoming, supportive, and inclusive environment where we treat others with fairness and respect, celebrate diversity, and elevate equality and inclusion as an equal opportunity employer.

Be the one who makes a difference!

With an innovative mind, a hungry heart, and engaging spirit you can change lives through education. Be a part of Vertex Education and let’s make a difference together. Apply Today!