Director of Product Engineering

Benefits

Additional Information

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 engineerin