VP, Software Engineering

At McGraw Hill, we are dedicated to delivering digital learning experiences that transform education for learners and educators. Our focus is on creating seamless, impactful products that truly benefit our users while supporting growth and collaboration across teams. We foster a culture that values innovation, teamwork, and a balance between career growth and personal well-being.

How can you make an impact?

McGraw-Hill’s Higher Education engineering team builds products that millions of students and instructors rely on every day - courseware, adaptive learning, and the data systems that make personalized education possible at scale. This VP of Engineering role sits at the center of that work.

The right candidate is ready to lead 100-200 engineers across a broad surface area of key initiatives. You’ll lead experienced engineering directors across courseware delivery, data and personalization, and our Sharpen product area. You’ll report directly to the SVP of Product Engineering and partner closely with product management, customer support, and our shared engineering platform and infrastructure teams. You will also work closely with Security, Data Engineering, and executive leadership to align technology investments with business priorities. The right leader also has experience with blending offshore and nearshore engineering talent with an onshore team, including vendor management.

This is a role for someone who is energized by complexity, credible with engineers and product leaders alike, and genuinely motivated by the impact great technology can have on learning outcomes.

This is a remote position open to applicants authorized to work for any employer within the United States.

What You’ll Do:

Define and drive engineering strategy

• You’ll own the engineering strategy for your areas - not just as a planning exercise, but as a living framework that guides how your teams make decisions, prioritize technical investment, and evolve their systems over time. That means understanding where the business is going, translating it into a technical vision your teams can execute against, and making the hard calls about what to build, what to modernize, and what to leave behind. You’ll partner with product leadership to ensure strategy is co-created, not handed off, and you’ll communicate it clearly enough that every engineer on your teams understands why their work matters.

Lead and develop experienced engineering leaders

• You’ll bring experience developing and leading directors and managers - people who run teams, make architectural decisions, and own outcomes. Your job is to make them better: sharpen their thinking, give them room to lead, create accountability structures that work, and invest in their growth with the same intention you’d want invested in your own. You’ll set a high bar and help people reach it. You’ll also build leadership bench strength through succession planning and intentional development of future engineering leaders.

Build systems for people to grow and thrive

• Great engineering organizations don’t happen by accident. You’ll be responsible for building the conditions that allow engineers at every level to do their best work - clear career paths, meaningful feedback loops, a culture of learning, and an environment where people feel challenged and supported in equal measure. That includes how your teams are structured, how work flows through them, how success is defined, and how people know they’re growing. When your systems are working, retention takes care of itself.

Recruit like it’s a competitive sport

• You understand that the team you build is the most important thing you’ll do in this role. You bring urgency and craft to hiring - you know how to find great people, how to convey the mission, how to move fast without cutting corners on quality, and how to build a pipeline before you need it. You’ll personally influence senior-level hiring decisions and ensure the organization has the leadership capability required to scale over time.

Design organizations that scale

• You think carefully about how teams are structured - not just to reflect today’s work, but to anticipate where the business is going. You know when a team has grown past what its structure can support, when a boundary between teams is causing friction, and when a reorg is the right answer versus a distraction. You’ll make org design decisions deliberately, communicate them clearly, and revisit them as conditions change. Structure should serve delivery, not the other way around.

Partner with product, sales and marketing - deeply and continuously

• Your business counterparts need an engineering leader who shows up as a thought partner, not just an executor. You’ll also partner effectively with executive leadership, helping shape business strategy and ensuring technology investments support long-term company objectives. You’ll co-own the roadmap, push back where needed, and make tradeoffs visible. The best outcomes here happen when engineering and product are genuinely working together, not just coordinating.

Navigate shared engineering effectively

• Our platform, infrastructure, and shared services teams sit outside your org but are essential to what your teams deliver. You’ll need to build strong working relationships across those boundaries, advocate for your teams’ needs, and contribute to enterprise-wide engineering standards - not just consume them.

Own your budget and spend it well

• You’ll own a meaningful budget ($20m+) and be accountable for how it’s used. That means building reliable forecasts, making sound tradeoffs between headcount, tooling, and vendor spend, and keeping your leaders honest about the real cost of technical decisions. You don’t need to be a finance expert, but you do need to treat budget as a leadership responsibility - not an administrative one. When you need to make a case for investment, you make it clearly and in business terms.

• Bachelors Degree (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience)

• 15+ years of professional experience, including at least 8 years in progressively senior engineering leadership roles.

• Superior financial acumen with the ability to drive efficient software engineering and operational practices while managing a budget of $20m+ and a staff of more than 150 professionals.

• Strong technical leadership in a product-engineering environment is required.

• Strong track record of delivering scaled software products to millions of users with at least $500m of annual revenue.

• Proven track record of superior tactical delivery in service of the business strategy.

• Proven experience in building, managing, and developing high-performing teams.

• Experience leading globally distributed teams, including offshore, nearshore, and vendor-managed organizations

• Keen business sense. Ability to communicate technical information in a clear and actionable way to non-technical stakeholders.

• Stay current on emerging software technologies and solutions.

• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain strong customer relationships.

• Exceptional problem solving, analytic and diagnostic skills.

• The candidate must also possess a strong full-stack software background, with a focus on usability, accessibility, and scalability.

• Highly motivated, proactive, collaborative team player with the ability to persuade others and influence outcomes.

Preferred:

• Prior experience in the EdTech industry, especially the Higher Ed market, is a significant plus.
• Prior experience with data driven products.
• Familiarity with adaptive learning, data/personalization platforms, or LMS ecosystems
• Experience leading engineering through a significant platform migration or modernization effort
• Deep experience within the media industry is a plus.

The work you do at McGraw Hill will be work that matters. We are collectively building experiences that will help shape the future of education. Play your part and experience a sense of fulfilment that will inspire you to even greater heights.

The pay range for this position is between $250,000 - $310,000 annually. However, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. An annual bonus plan may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical and/or other benefits, depending on the position offered. Click here to learn more about our benefit offerings.