Engineering Director

Engineering Director 

College Board – Technology 

Location: This is a remote role. Candidates who live near CB offices have the option of being fully remote or hybrid (Tuesday and Wednesday in office). All CB employees are required to occasionally travel to meet in person for business purposes.

Role Type:  Full-time position 

About the Team  

Team Observatory is a high-performing, self-organizing group of technologists focused on building and operating mission-critical score reporting systems and insights platforms that serve College Board’s Student community for CRA/AP Programs and the Bluebook platform. The work demands operational excellence, accuracy, and resilience at scale, while also requiring the team to continuously adapt to evolving business needs, technologies, and platforms. As College Board advances its 2027 strategy, this team is at the center of a multi-year transformation toward a consolidated, authentic Bluebook platform. The team balances the delivery of today’s critical capabilities with the exploration and adoption of new technologies, modern architectures, and AI-enabled solutions that will shape the future of score reporting.

About the Opportunity   

As an Engineering Director, you will lead a high-impact team responsible for delivering and operating systems that are foundational to College Board’s mission. This is an opportunity to lead in a dynamic, evolving environment where reliability, scale, and innovation must coexist.

You will guide your team through a changing technology and business landscape—balancing the demands of mission-critical score reporting with the opportunity to modernize platforms, adopt emerging technologies, and contribute to College Board’s long-term Bluebook strategy. You will be expected to deliver results today while helping position the organization for what comes next.

In this role, you are a catalyst and force multiplier: setting direction, removing obstacles, and enabling engineers to do their best work. You will bring clarity to ambiguity, translate strategy into execution, and build strong partnerships across product, architecture, data, and business teams. Your leadership will directly influence how College Board evolves its student score reporting capabilities into a scalable, secure, and unified platform. This role offers meaningful growth—for you and for the team. As College Board continues its journey toward a consolidated Bluebook platform, team scope, responsibilities, and technical challenges will evolve. You will play a key role in shaping that evolution while fostering a culture of learning, experimentation, and continuous improvement. 

In this role, you will:  

Lead and Manage the team (40%) 

• Lead a team of approximately eight engineers, responsible for building and operating student score reporting systems.

• Set a clear vision and priorities for the team, track progress against goals, and provide coaching and feedback to support high performance and growth.

• Foster an inclusive, high-achieving culture where team members are engaged, supported, and able to do their best work.

• Build effective team structures and plan for evolving skill and capacity needs as product scope and platform strategy grow.

• Develop and leverage the strengths of individual team members to deliver high-quality, scalable solutions using cloud and AI-enabled technologies.

• Support diversity and inclusion across perspectives, skills, and experiences.

• Consistently model College Board’s Operating Principles and Manager Expectations in daily leadership practices.

Strategic Partnership & Technical Communication (30%) 

• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to clarify score reporting needs, constraints, and opportunities across student audiences.

• Build trusted relationships with product, data, and engineering leaders to align priorities across complex, interdependent systems.

• Communicate technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences, enabling informed decision-making and shared understanding.

• Act as a technology partner in advancing AI-enabled capabilities that enhance score reporting, insights, and operational efficiency.

• Drive engineering excellence through design reviews, shared standards, and constructive technical debate.

• Balance scope, impact, and effort to deliver meaningful value while recognizing diminishing returns.

• Collaborate closely with Solutions Architects, Senior and Lead Engineers, and Data Leads to evaluate features, estimate effort, and plan delivery.  

Discovery, Definition & Delivery (30%) 

• Develop a deep understanding of the business problems your team supports and translate them into clear technical direction.

• Lead Agile (and post-Agile) delivery practices, ensuring clarity of priorities, disciplined execution, and sustained delivery momentum.

• Guide technical decision-making by evaluating solution options, balancing tradeoffs, and acting as an arbiter when needed.

• Partner with technology leaders to align architecture, cloud services, and delivery patterns with organizational goals.

• Translate product and platform roadmaps into actionable plans, sequencing and prioritizing epics and stories with stakeholders.

• Manage scope intentionally while identifying and reducing technical debt over time.

• Monitor application cost and performance, partnering with internal teams to optimize efficiency and scalability.

• Embed security and compliance considerations into all phases of design and delivery.

• Ensure clean delivery and operational readiness, maintaining reliable services throughout their lifecycle.

• Lead the identification, triage, and resolution of production issues to maintain system stability and reliability.

• Continue to learn and keep abreast of developments in Generative AI software, sharing that knowledge within the team to support best practices

About You  

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including building and operating secure, data-intensive, cloud-based systems.

• Demonstrated success leading engineering teams to deliver complex products, services, or platform capabilities at scale.
• Hands-on experience managing or owning web applications, ideally a user-facing portal, with a working knowledge of the security and infrastructure considerations that come with them, such as authentication, access controls, web application firewalls, and hosting environments.

• Strong people-management experience, including coaching, performance management, and career development.

• Proven ability to plan, prioritize, and execute in fast-paced, evolving environments.

• Solid technical judgment with experience reviewing designs, guiding architectural decisions, and partnering with senior engineers.

• Experience with modern cloud architectures; familiarity with AI integrations is a plus.

• Ability to influence engineering strategy and decision-making across teams and leadership levels.

• Calm, thoughtful leadership under pressure, with a focus on outcomes and continuous improvement.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to translate between business and technical contexts.

All roles at College Board require:

• A passion for expanding educational and career opportunities and mission-driven work

• Curiosity and enthusiasm for emerging technologies, with a willingness to experiment with and adopt new AI-driven solutions and comfort with learning and applying new digital tools independently and proactively. 

• Clear and concise communication skills, written and verbal

• A learner's mindset and a commitment to growth: welcoming diverse perspectives, giving and receiving timely, respectful feedback, and continuously improving through iterative learning and user input.

• A drive for impact and excellence: solving complex problems, making data-informed decisions, prioritizing what matters most, and continuously improving through learning, user input, and external benchmarking.

• A collaborative and empathetic approach: working across differences, fostering trust, and contributing to a culture of shared success

• Authorization to work in the United States

About Our Process

• Application review will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.

• While the hiring process may vary, it generally includes: resume and application submission, recruiter phone/video screen, hiring manager interview, a performance exercise, a panel interview, a conversation with leadership, and reference checks.

What We Offer

At College Board, we offer more than a paycheck — we provide a meaningful career, a supportive team, and a comprehensive package designed to help you thrive. We're a self-sustaining nonprofit that believes in fair and competitive compensation grounded in your qualifications, experience, impact, and the market.

A Thoughtful Approach to Compensation

• The hiring range for this role is $140,000 – $175,000.

• Your exact salary will depend on your location, experience, and how your background compares to others in similar roles at the College Board.

• We aim to make our best offer upfront, rooted in fairness, transparency, and market data.

• We adjust salaries by location to ensure fairness, no matter where you live.

You'll have open, transparent conversations about compensation, benefits, and what it's like to work at College Board throughout your hiring process. Check out our careers page for more.

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