What We Do

Reading Reimagined is a mission-driven, inclusive R&D initiative that seeks to unlock the great reader in every child to end illiteracy in our country -- centering the experiences of Black, Latino, and Native American students and students living in poverty. We fund research to answer unanswered questions in literacy learning and the development of practical tools that incorporate new and existing research while leveraging students' linguistic assets and maximizing the supportive role of caring adults and technology. We’re currently hiring our founding team of mission-driven individuals committed to the massive undertaking before us.

Reading Reimagined is part of a multi-year research and development (R&D) program under AERDF (The Advanced Education Research and Development Fund). AERDF supports ambitious, inclusive R&D programs designed to tackle intractable teaching and learning challenges that disproportionately affect Black and Latino students and students of all races experiencing poverty. 
This is a fully-remote position. 

🔥 Key Highlights 🔥

• Fully-funded with a 3 year runway
• Founding team of literacy experts, practitioners, designers, and former systems leaders, including founder Rebecca Kockler, former Assistant Superintendent of Academic Content for the Louisiana Department of Education
• Deep partnership with a network of nationally recognized advisors and thought leaders in education, product development, learning design, technology and research, including our Advisory Council
• Two fully digital, research-based foundational reading prototypes built and currently being tested

👉 Check out our website here: https://aerdf.org/programs/reading-reimagined/

About the Role

As the Director of Engineering, you will be a technical leader who leads and guides our technical teams. You will drive team goals and direction, communicate complex features and systems in detail, and collaborate with organization leaders to help improve the overall level of performance of our systems, and hire our engineering team. You understand, and can discern the tradeoffs between technologies across domains and their respective stacks. As Director of Engineering, you’ll be responsible for leading a development team to accomplish the core technology goals for the organization, proposing a dev roadmap, designing team structures and creating hiring plans to support growth efforts. You remain up-to-date on new technologies and design patterns, and are deeply passionate about performance, availability, latency and scalability. Your work will not only help us innovate the literacy solutions for learners from underserved demographics, it will be pivotal to shaping how Reading Reimagined achieves and scales learner impact through contextually relevant instruction that is loved by Learners, Parents, and Educators.

This Job is For You If You:

• Demonstrable history of building, and scaling internal engineering teams.
• Have experience building excellent engineering standard for growing teams of engineers, and designers.
• Comfortable managing multiple engineering teams across multiple initiatives simultaneously.
• Have built out engineering teams from scratch.
• Have worked with software vendors, and transitioned to internal engineering teams.
• Have 7 years of engineering management experience and 1 years engineering implementation experience
• Have 3 years cloud architecture experience (AWS preferred)
• Take on the role of managing and mentoring Senior Engineers across organizations
• Are experienced in driving large cross-functional/industry-wide engineering efforts; building large-scale applications and operating at scale
• Demonstrate a passion for building great end-user experiences
• Are an excellent written and oral communicator with a proven track record of being able to effectively collaborate with key stakeholders across the business
• Are resourceful and analytical with a natural ability to problem solve
• Possess strong organizational and team leadership skills with develop and maintain hiring plans and department budgets
• Have experience setting up robust, scalable quality assurance pipelines.
• Embody an entrepreneurial drive to achieve stretch goals in a fast-paced environment

👉 Interested in this role but not sure if you’re the right fit for this particular position? We’ll be hiring many different roles in 2023 and encourage you to apply along with your CV and a brief summary of your background and interest in the organization.

Our Ideal Candidate has Experience in:

Preferred Qualifications

• US deployment experience in K-12 education technology or similar
• Experience with adaptable educational games, learning data environments, learner modeling, learning management systems
• Familiarity with education technology best practices and challenges
• Experience leading teams through ambiguity, and high stakes trade off decisions
• Experience building internal capacity to support and scale engineering initiatives
• Experience in shipping products to millions of customers

What You’ll Do:

• Onboard, manage, and negotiate technical builds with multiple software development, and gaming agencies
• Lead key decisions around which technologies are best suited for the longevity of our platform
• Build out internal engineering team to aid, and eventually replace our development agency partners
• Build out our AI-enabled voice recognition software roadmap
• Hire a cross functional team of back-end, front-end, and gaming developers to support and maintain our childhood literacy gaming platform
• Work with product and engineering teams, to oversee the project’s engineering roadmap and work schedules
• Encourage a culture of inclusivity and disciplined software engineering practices to deliver business value
• Manage project planning, budget, priorities, deadlines, and delivery of results
• Mentoring, uplifting, and nurturing the growth of team members
• Hire, retain and grow top talent on the team; Lead the team with a growth mindset and model a diverse and inclusive environment
• Drive the team's goals and technical direction to pursue opportunities that make your larger organization more efficient
• Coordinate with Product, Business, Learning and other groups to manage engineering effort to meet their needs
• Effectively communicate complex features and systems in detail to non-technical teams
• Understand industry & company-wide trends to help assess & develop new technologies
• Lead long term technical vision and roadmap for large cross-company efforts
• Partner closely with infrastructure and operations teams to build and scale back-end services
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across domains: architecture, design, code reviews, development, quality assurance, observability, and live site
• Helps set and maintain professional standards for your team
• Learn from a passionate group of coworkers about how to solve the literacy gap and share your unique perspective on this challenge

What We'll Offer You:

• We offer a competitive compensation package and our base compensation levels vary depending on location, experience, and qualifications. The starting salary range for this position is $150,000 to $205,000
• Competitive medical, dental, vision benefits
• Opportunity to work remotely for a mission-driven company full of change-makers
• 401k with 3% guaranteed match, option 4% match on top
• Student loan repayment support
• Work environment that values balance and harmony
• Opportunity to travel and meet your team members in-person 2x per year

How to Apply

We can’t wait to hear from you. Please submit a resume and cover letter at https://www.aerdf.org/careers/ letting us know who you are and why you’d be a great fit for our team and for this position. We’ll consider applicants on a rolling basis.

We are deeply committed to the diversity of our workforce. People of all backgrounds, particularly those with the lived experience of the students and communities we serve, are encouraged to apply. Please do not hesitate to apply even if you do not meet all of the qualifications. Candidates of all backgrounds and identities are encouraged to apply.