Job Requisition ID: 18334

Additional Locations:  

“Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is a high-purpose, high-performing, leading K-12 EdTech company, powered by values and culture that support continuous learning and rapid innovation. Known for serving more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150+ countries, we provide learning to countless students and teachers, transforming lives, supporting communities, and making our society more open, just, and inclusive for all. HMH Technology India Pvt. Ltd. is our technology and innovation arm in India, focused on developing products and solutions using cutting-edge technology in order to better serve education globally. We aim to help employees grow as people, not just as professionals. We do work that matters and are in a unique position to support and empower people’s lives.”

Software Engineering Manager for the HMH Reporting Platform Team

HMH Software Engineering

HMH Software Engineering provides cutting edge, individualized learning experiences to millions of students across the United States. We are as driven by this mission as we are by continuously improving ourselves and the way we work. Our offices are high energy, collaborative beehives of activity where work is centered on small, autonomous teams that build great software.  We trust each other, hold ourselves and our teammates accountable for results, and improve student outcomes with each release.

At HMH we constantly experiment with new approaches and novel ways of solving problems.  We often succeed and sometimes stumble — either way we learn and move forward with more confidence than we had the day before.  We are as passionate about new technologies and engineering craftsmanship as we are about transforming the EdTech industry itself.

If this sounds like you let’s talk. 

The Opportunity — Software Engineering Manager

A Software Engineering Manager directly manages a group of 5-12 software engineers across several scrum teams, fostering a healthy and productive engineering culture. They should have strong technical foundations to define a high-level architecture and should be willing to roll up their sleeves, motivate their team and execute on the implementation plan(s) for product/solution development.  The Engineering Manager engages in mentoring and career development of software engineers, performing code reviews, promoting engineering best practices, as well as working with software engineers and architects to determine best technical solutions.

Engineering Managers have to work with product owners to fully define requirements, refine architecture/technical specs by working with Architects and/or Business Analysts, and producing reports on a variety of engineering KPIs/Metrics. They are entrusted to partner with Product Owners to define the roadmap and the overall strategy and vision for your area of the business. They have to work with global engineering teams to get the features developed and delivered with high quality. Engineering Managers also needs to participate in recruiting/interviewing engineering candidates.

Reporting Platform:

You will be working on the Reporting Platform that is part of the HMH Educational Online/Digital Learning Platform. The Reporting team builds highly scalable and available platform using cutting edge technologies. The platform is built using Microservices Architecture, Java microservices backend, REACT JavaScript UI Frontend, REST APIs, AWS RDS Postgres Database, AWS Cloud technologies, AWS Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Spark with Scala, Kubernetes or Mesos orchestration, Apache Airflow scheduler, DataDog for logging/monitoring/alerting, Concourse CI or Jenkins, Maven etc.

Responsibilities:

As a Software Engineering Manager, you will:

• Enable and empower people to do their best work in an environment that encourages collaboration and innovation and fosters development and learning.
• Drive your scrum teams towards timely execution often with competing priorities. Negotiate technical needs vs. new features and be a key contributor in defining the product roadmap.
• Translate the company’s strategic vision, align group’s work, and help individuals understand their impact on HMH’s success.
• Mentor and motivate direct reports towards their career goals and actively develop your team’s skillset and put together a deep bench through proactive conversations, goal settings, and performance evaluations.
• Collaborate and be a catalyst, breaking down complex problems into simple solutions and leading through change.
• Hold teams to high standards in writing quality scalable and supportable code, complete with appropriate unit tests, automated testing, documentation, and operationalization aspects in a CI/CD environment.
• Lead by example and use your technical expertise and perspective to drive innovation.
• Work collaboratively as part of a software development team producing software that advances our core mission.
• Continue to improve team’s Agile processes and plan for the next thing in the product pipeline.
• Act as a technical lead for engineering projects and proactively volunteer to perform key activities.
• Partner with leadership, stakeholders and product management in planning, execution and management of resources, roadmap, and releases.
• Eagerly learn and apply new cutting-edge technologies.
• Contribute to our engineering culture and ever-improving concept of engineering best practices.
• Promote engineering best practices, monitor team performance, and gather team metrics.
• Align people, technology, and process decisions across teams.

Skills & Experience

Successful Candidates must demonstrate an appropriate combination of:

• 10+ years of experience and a Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• 3+ years of experience managing Software Engineers and leading Agile scrum teams.
• Understand the software development process and how their work contributes to the larger goals, know how to make that process better, one step at a time.
• Experience working with a team on a large project, typically working with Agile software development methodologies.
• Experience in analyzing and scaling large systems, web development, Javascript frameworks (e.g., ReactJS), or DevOps/infrastructure tasks.
• Experience working with JVM-based languages such as Java.
• Experience in Spring Boot, web services, building APIs and services using REST, SOAP, etc.
• Be very proficient with SQL databases (Postgres/MySql/Oracle).
• Supporting streaming event processing using Spark framework with Scala.
• Background in CI/CD and DevOps mindset/culture using Jenkins or Concourse.
• Experience with Lean Agile Scrum methodology, building test plans, unit tests, and automated testing.
• Knowledge of container technologies such as Docker.
• Proficient with code versioning tools such as GIT, CVS, and SVN.
• Strong background in cloud technologies AWS and systems like Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Amazon Kinesis, etc.
• Preferably knowledge of Apache Airflow.
• Interest in technologies like Mesos, Aurora, Kubernetes.
• Interest in adopting new technologies and methodologies such as functional programming, distributed computing, machine learning, advanced data engineering, serverless computing.
• Preferably experience with serverless (Functions/Lambda or containers).
• Loves a hands-on approach, thinking with a product mindset, and delivering.  

Required Education:

•  A BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a STEM field.