Lead Software Engineer - AI

Job Overview

Overview

Impact the Moment

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Lead Software Engineer - AI to join our innovative team. The ideal candidate will possess extensive expertise in building full stack applications. Since this position entails leading the development of Generative AI enabled apps, practical experience in generative AI and demonstrating a profound understanding of its principles, applications, and latest advancements is highly desirable. This role requires a dynamic individual who can seamlessly integrate AI solutions across the full stack, driving forward our AI initiatives and ensuring robust, scalable implementations.

We’re looking for people who like problem solving, exhibit independent creativity, and function cooperatively on a team. As a Lead Software Engineer - AI at McGraw Hill, you have a sense of personal accountability, a curiosity to research new technologies and methodologies, and a pervasive desire to dig into complex issues while respecting timelines and team commitments.

Your impact on team:

At McGraw Hill, a team’s engineers look up to, admire, and trust their lead. Leads contribute directly to the codebase and mentor other team members. They often have people directly report to them. They have a strong desire and motivation to grow the individuals on their team and the team. Leads are opinionated and back up their opinions with data and experience. Leads are advocates for their team members and have as much interest on individual successes on the team as they do of the team’s success. As your hands-on contributions, you will build front-end web interfaces, back-end application code and AI capabilities across our portfolio. This is a remote position open to applicants within the United States.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead design, development, implementation, and maintenance of AI platform & AI powered tools / applications.
• Stay up to date with the latest advancements in AI technologies, exploring opportunities to integrate new AI capabilities into existing or new applications.
• Work with a team of individual contributors through leadership and delegation, along with your own hands-on contributions, to build our web applications, including building entirely new applications, making major product updates, and maintaining our existing portfolio. Our products at McGraw Hill are used by millions of people every day. Some have an SLA of 99.95% uptime; stability and quality solutions are key!
• Work with product, engineering, SRE, and other leadership to understand how your solutions will be planned, developed, implemented, and supported.
• Implement best practices for application security and ensure compliance with relevant data privacy and protection regulations.
• Contribute to CI/CD processes to allow for smoother releases and increasing team confidence.
• Use your interpersonal skills and ability to collaborate effectively with product sponsors and senior leadership in engineering and the greater business.
• Understand the business requirements of products, tasks, and stores, and if you identify possible gaps, ambiguities, missing scenarios, opportunities, etc., raise them with the team and with leadership so we can all improve them.
• Work with a distributed team to solve problems quickly and collaboratively.
• Consider the full lifecycle of solutions when building them from initial conception to launch then maintenance all the way to sunsetting.
• Mentor junior engineers to help grow their professional careers.

About You:

• You have experience developing AI powered solutions at an enterprise level.
• You have led a team of individual contributor engineers, having come from an engineering background yourself. You have empathy for engineers and balance that with realities of the business.
• You interface well with other business units and leadership, being able to describe situations and technical approaches to foster an environment of trust and confidence.
• You have deep expertise developing both front-ends and back-ends of modern web applications and have a general understanding what is involved in front-end development as well.
• You build front-ends with the needs of our users in mind, partnering with our UX team members to build the best experiences for our teachers, students, and other personas.
• You consider the needs of accessible designs in all steps of the engineering process for those with visual, auditory, sensory, cognitive, and other considerations.
• You design APIs that are meant to be consumed by others, so ease of use, simplistic design, and other attributes that benefit interoperability are key.
• You believe in understanding why work is being done and empathizing with the users, not just implementing code and moving onto the next task.
• You have demonstrated software delivery experience with a distributed product & engineering team.
• You can work in a fast-paced software release environment, where you continuously deliver production-grade (near-zero downtime, fault-tolerant, etc.) software daily for a system with millions of users around the world.
• You have contributed to the full software development life cycle, including writing application code, unit/integration/automation tests, documentation, and performance engineering and security.

We have a very diverse stack that can vary across teams and projects. Some of the technologies we use include:

• Back-end: Python, Go, Node.js
• Front-end: TypeScript, Angular, React and Playwright
• AI services such as Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI service, Amazon Bedrock or similar technologies.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): ECS, RDS, Lambda, and many other services
• CI/CD and Infrastructure: Docker, Terraform, Github, CircleCI, Sonarqube, NewRelic and Datadog
• Collaboration: JIRA, Confluence, Zoom, Slack, and Office 365
• Databases: Relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL; NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB

Why McGraw Hill?

• We firmly believe in the mission of educating students and helping them succeed.
• Our teams operate in a collaborative and safe environment where everyone’s input is valued, trusted, and respected.
• You’ll have opportunity for horizontal and vertical movement and growth throughout the organization, including clear career paths for your long term personal and professional growth. We hire good people rather than filling team vacancies or checking boxes for technical skillsets.
• We have a mindset of “deliver value, not features”: we produce meaningful products and services for our students, teachers, administrators, and others that further our educational mission rather than focus on just executing a JIRA ticket number

The pay range for this position is between $124,350 - $175,000 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.

McGraw Hill recruiters always use a “@mheducation.com” email address and/or from our Applicant Tracking System, iCIMS. Any variation of this email domain should be considered suspicious. Additionally, McGraw Hill recruiters and authorized representatives will never request sensitive information in email. 

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