Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure & Data Engineering

About the role

Today, 67% of students and 82% of low-income students can’t read at grade level by the end of third grade. That’s when students are supposed to go from learning to read to reading to learn. It’s America’s number one education crisis and we know how to fix it.

Ignite Reading delivers one-to-one virtual tutoring that teaches every student the foundational skills they need to become a confident, fluent reader. We pair students who need extra support with expert reading tutors who provide daily, 15-minute, Science of Reading-based instruction that rapidly closes their decoding gaps. We focus on the foundational reading skills—phonics, phonemic awareness, and sight words—kids need to master so they can decode a sentence. Students in Ignite Reading’s program achieve over 2 weeks of reading skills growth per week of instruction, and notably all students achieve the same outstanding results including students with IEPs, multilingual learners, students of color and those receiving free or reduced-price lunch.

Ignite Reading is a mission-driven public benefit corporation. We believe we can do well for our team members and shareholders while we solve one of the nation’s biggest challenges. We believe we will be more successful with a diverse team and are seeking candidates who have lived experience related to social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

YOUR ROLE

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, the Senior Platform Engineering Manager, Infrastructure & Data Engineering owns the platform on which all of Ignite Reading’s engineering and analytics work runs. You will lead two teams — DevOps and Data Engineering (six engineers total) — that together provide the cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and data platform serving a 33-person engineering organization and our Data team.

This is a player-coach role. You will manage and grow experienced engineers, set technical direction across both teams, and stay close enough to the work to review designs, shape architecture, and earn the trust of senior ICs. You will also own our security compliance program — our annual SOC2 audit and penetration test — as a program leader coordinating auditors, vendors, and internal teams.

We don’t expect deep expertise in both infrastructure and data engineering — leaders with that profile are rare, and the role doesn’t require it. We’re looking for real depth in one domain and genuine fluency in the other: enough to guide technical decisions, ask the questions that matter, and know when to lean on your senior engineers.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Lead, manage, and grow two teams: DevOps (cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, incident response) and Data Engineering (pipelines, warehouse, data platform).

- Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and career development for six engineers, including developing technical leads within each team.

- Set and drive a unified platform roadmap in partnership with the Director of Engineering and VP of Data, balancing infrastructure investment, data platform direction, and technical debt against delivery needs.