Senior Director, Software Development

About Modern Campus

Modern Campus empowers institutions to move with confidence across the modern learner journey. Our platform spans web content management, curriculum and catalog management, student engagement and lifelong learning — giving more than 1,700 colleges and universities the infrastructure they need to support the entire learner-to-earner lifecycle and deliver personalized, scalable experiences.

We partner with the education community to create new pathways for learning and opportunity, reimagining how institutions serve the modern learner and shape the future of education.

Our purpose — our north star — is to empower institutions to confidently serve and support the modern learner.

This mission and purpose come to life through how we show up every day:

• We exist to create empowerment through education.
• We lead with honesty and empathy.
• We shape the future through innovation.
• We become trusted partners.
• We make the complex feel possible.

What's the role?

The Senior Director of Development is accountable for engineering execution, technical stewardship, and organizational effectiveness for the teams building and operating the Modern Campus Connected Curriculum product suite, with the expectation that this scope may expand to include additional product lines over time. This role ensures predictable delivery, high-quality systems, and strong alignment with product strategy across its areas of responsibility.

This role requires deep technical fluency across Modern Campus technology stacks and active engagement in technical discussions across the R&D organization. The Senior Director contributes meaningfully to architectural design, technical tradeoff decisions, and long-term technical direction across both product and emerging platform domains.

In addition to product delivery, this role is responsible for guiding the evolution of foundational services and platform components that support Connected Curriculum and future Modern Campus products. The Senior Director is an active member of the Architecture Council, helping shape and drive platform architecture in alignment with long-term organizational goals.

This role also helps advance engineering effectiveness through thoughtful adoption of AI-assisted and agentic software development practices. This includes identifying opportunities to improve engineering leverage through agentic workflows, development harnesses, and automation patterns that accelerate delivery while maintaining strong standards for quality, security, and architectural integrity.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Execution & Delivery

• Own delivery commitments across Connected Curriculum and associated product teams, ensuring predictable execution, quality, and operational readiness.
• Translate product roadmap priorities into engineering plans, capacity models, and sequencing strategies in partnership with Product leadership.
• Establish consistent expectations for planning, estimation, dependency management, and risk mitigation.
• Provide clear and accurate delivery visibility to executive stakeholders, proactively surfacing risks and tradeoffs.
• Ensure teams balance feature delivery with ongoing investment in reliability, scalability, and technical health.

Technical Leadership & Platform Alignment

• Act as a senior technical leader, engaging deeply in architecture, system design, and cross-product technical decisions.
• Contribute as a core member of the Architecture Council, helping define and evolve system-wide architectural direction.
• Drive the design and development of foundational platform services and shared components that support Connected Curriculum and other Modern Campus products.
• Ensure product architectures align with emerging platform standards, shared services, and long-term scalability goals.
• Guide major technical decisions and tradeoffs, balancing speed of delivery with sustainability, reuse, and operational excellence.
• Maintain accountability for technical health across all owned systems, including performance, security, scalability, and reduction of technical debt.
• Lead modernization efforts across legacy systems, aligning them with platform-oriented architecture.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted and agentic development practices, including development harnesses, workflow automation, and engineering guardrails that improve delivery speed, quality, and scalability.
• Guide the design and evolution of agentic SDLC patterns that enable teams to safely apply AI in design, implementation, testing, review, documentation, and operational workflows.
• Ensure AI-enabled development practices align with platform architecture, engineering standards, security requirements, and long-term maintainability.

People Leadership & Organizational Effectiveness

• Lead and develop engineering leadership across multiple teams and product areas, setting expectations for delivery ownership, technical leadership, and team health.
• Own hiring, onboarding, performance management, and succession planning across assigned engineering teams.
• Build and retain high-performing organizations with strong technical depth and leadership capability.
• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence aligned with Modern Campus values.
• Build organizational capability in AI-first and agentic development practices, helping teams adopt new workflows, tools, and engineering habits effectively.
• Establish clear expectations, coaching, and governance for responsible use of AI in the software development lifecycle.

Multi-Product Engineering Leadership

• Scale engineering leadership and execution across multiple product lines as scope expands beyond Connected Curriculum.
• Apply consistent standards for delivery discipline, technical stewardship, and organizational health across all product engineering groups.
• Ensure new and existing product teams align with shared architectural direction and platform capabilities.
• Partner with Product leadership as scope expands to ensure engineering capacity, architecture, and delivery models scale effectively.
• Manage cross-product dependencies and reduce technical fragmentation across the portfolio.

What Success Looks Like

• Connected Curriculum and related product roadmaps are delivered predictably and with high quality.
• Foundational platform services and shared components are successfully adopted across products.
• Engineering organizations operate with strong ownership, engagement, and low attrition.
• Product and platform architectures align with long-term scalability, reuse, and maintainability goals.
• Technical debt is actively managed and reduced over time.
• AI-assisted and agentic development practices measurably improve engineering effectiveness without compromising quality, security, or architectural integrity.
• Product and Engineering operate as trusted, accountable partners.
• Executive stakeholders have confidence in engineering execution, scalability, and platform evolution.

What you offer...

Required

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating complex, customer-facing SaaS platforms.
• 6+ years in engineering leadership roles with accountability for multiple teams or product areas.
• Proven ownership of delivery outcomes across a portfolio of work.
• Deep technical fluency and the ability to engage at a detailed level in architecture, system design, and technical tradeoff discussions.
• Strong working knowledge of modern web application stacks, including:
• • Frontend: React, TypeScript, modern frontend architectures
  • Backend: Java, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs
  • Data: Relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)
  • Cloud: AWS, containerized and CI/CD-based environments
• Experience designing or evolving platform-oriented architectures and shared services.
• Experience improving engineering effectiveness through AI-assisted development practices, workflow automation, or related SDLC innovation.
• Strong understanding of how to apply AI within the software development lifecycle in ways that preserve quality, security, maintainability, and team accountability.
• Demonstrated ability to partner closely with Product leadership and influence across organizational boundaries.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to clearly articulate technical risks and tradeoffs to executive audiences.

Preferred

• Experience leading engineering organizations across multiple products or product lines, or successfully scaling scope from a single product to a portfolio.
• Experience building or modernizing platforms that support multiple applications or domains.
• Familiarity with event-driven or distributed systems.
• Experience operating in environments balancing legacy systems with ongoing modernization.
• Experience leading adoption of agentic or AI-first software development practices, including development harnesses, workflow automation, or structured engineering copilots.
• Familiarity with operationalizing agentic SDLC patterns that support code generation, testing, review, documentation, and engineering productivity at scale.
• Background in EdTech, academic operations systems, or enterprise SaaS platforms.

What we offer...

• The base salary range* for this position is between $180,000-$200,000
• Remote first workplace!
• Rewards and recognition programs
• Learning and development opportunities
• The ability to make a difference every day for universities trying to grow and students trying to learn!

Only qualified candidates selected for interviews will be contacted.

What we believe...

At Modern Campus, we believe that a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace furthers relevance, resilience, and longevity. We encourage people from all backgrounds, ages, abilities, and experiences to apply for our positions. Modern Campus is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is committed to bring on hires regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status (for US candidates). If you require accommodations during any part of the interview process due to a disability, please let our recruiter know.

* Our salary ranges reflect the minimum and maximum target for new hires for the position within the US and Canada. Within the range, individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.