Engineering Manager - DevOps & Security

About The RoleMagpie Literacy is on a bold mission to eradicate illiteracy, and we’re looking for an Engineering Manager of DevOps & Security to keep our production heartbeat strong and secure. Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you’ll own the operational health, security protocols, and compliance programs that safeguard all aspects of our learning experience. You’ll lead a multidisciplinary team and collaborate with our peers in Operations and Compliance, Engineering, and Product, to ensure that we can enable a highly-effective, research-driven literacy experience for our K-8 learners. Our ideal candidate is based in the US and has experience working in remote-first, distributed teamsdistributed teamsWhat You’ll Do: You’ll own the reliability, security, and scalability of our cloud‑native platform that powers literacy‑advancing products used across school districts in the United States. Working closely with engineering, operations, and compliance leads, you’ll make reliable uptime, enhanced security, and blameless incident response into everyday realities—while growing a high‑performing team of SRE, DevOps, and security engineers who share your passion for continuous improvement and mission‑driven impact.Enable highly effective operations: Guard availability, performance, and cost‑efficiency across all environments; lead on‑call rotations, incident response, and post‑mortems; own escalation playbooks that resolve customer‑facing issues swiftly and transparently.Elevate our security posture to enable a best-in-class learning experience: Oversee identity/RBAC, vulnerability management, privacy and regulatory compliance, and IaC security; conduct risk assessments and code reviews; report security health to executives and Risk Management.Grow & empower the team: Recruit, mentor, and coach DevOps, SRE, and Security engineers; cultivate a culture of psychological safety, data‑driven decision‑making, collaborative and iterative improvement, and continuous learning.Automate and innovate: Partner with Engineering teams to design reliable, scalable architectures; drive monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and self‑service tooling that reduce toil and accelerate delivery.RequirementsA strong candidate will possess:Strong experience in DevOps and Security 7+ years of experience in SRE/DevOps, SecDevOps, and Security roles with a minimum of 3 years in a managerial capacity. Experience managing a mix of full-time employees and contractors would be preferred, but not required. Strong organization and communication skills You’re a clear communicator with the ability to bring others along with you. You bring a collaborative approach to working with cross-functional peers, and setting clear expectations is your jam. You believe in the value of documentation - decisions, approaches, technical designs, controls, workflows - and ensure the capacity for the creation of it.People-centric and mission-driven You center users in how you plan, strategize, and execute your roadmap. You have a desire to make the world better, and are driven by missions you believe in. You build and lead teams that approach continuous learning as a core value, and are open to learning from mistakes. You create clear avenues for bidirectional feedback. Experience working in a fast-paced startup environment You have demonstrated experience in doing this work within a business that is building greenfield products, and shipping new products backed by data-driven analysis. You work well in being resourceful and innovative during times of ambiguity.Your first 180 days at Magpie may look like: Within your first 30 days you are gathering context, building your knowledge of our existing systems and current approaches. You’re building relationships within the Security and Devops, Engineering, and Operations teams. You’re documenting topics you learn as you onboard, especially if you find something that hasn’t been established yet. You’re connecting with senior leadership to gain insight on our core mission and priorities. You understand the high-level of our Engineering and Product roadmaps. By day 60, you’re engaging with the organization’s priorities, and getting clearer on how you and your team drive critical outcomes, in the short and long term. You have a baseline understanding of why the instructional vision of Magpie, and delivery through complex school systems, is our north star - and are framing your idea for where Security and DevOps plays a critical role. You’ve connected with our product teams in K-2 and 3-8, including Product, Academics, and our GMs. You’ve connected with Growth and Operations to understand the security, privacy, and availability needs of our users, and you understand our security and data protection policies, controls, and current and future priorities. You’ve taken over management and leadership of the team. You’ve shipped something minor to production, to get a feel for your team’s software development lifecycle. Within engineering, you understand our current architecture design review process - and your role in approving designs from a security standpoint. By day 90, you’ve fully taken the reins as our devops and security leader. You’re clear on what must be true for the work, and how you will lead the team to accomplish it. You’ve framed and implemented at least 1 key improvement in our current processes. Maybe you’ve found some efficiencies to be gained in our on-call escalation process, and have proposed solutions, then rolled it out. You’ve taken a look at our secure engineering practices, and rolled out some improvements to our training and development. You’ve partnered with peer Engineering leads to take on framing key OKRs for your team. You’ve also begun running the monthly vulnerability and risk review sessions with the Risk Committee (COO, Compliance, Head of Engineering). Day 180, you’ve fully arrived at Magpie! You’ve attended our Fall retreat, and are engaged in roadmap development for the next 1-2 quarters. You’ve shipped improvements to our observability approach - including measuring and reporting on key infrastructure metrics. You’ve taken on ownership of key service level objectives for DevOps and Security. You’ve started framing a vision for 2026 for your team, based on conversations with product teams, compliance, and research. BenefitsWhat you’ll get Salary range of $165,000-$180,000 per annum Competitive medical, dental, vision benefits 401k with 4% guaranteed match Opportunity to work remotely for a mission-driven company full of change-makers Enjoy the freedom of flexible time off to balance work and personal life, ensuring you stay refreshed and productive Opportunity to travel and meet your team members in-person 2x per year About the companyWe are on a mission to unlock the great reader in every child to end illiteracy in our country -- centering the experiences of Black, Latino, and Native American students and students experiencing poverty. We are developing research-based, identity-affirming PK-8+ digital literacy tools that leverage student uniquenesses to help every child master the foundational reading skills needed to become strong, confident readers. We’re currently hiring our founding team of mission-driven individuals committed to helping us develop a scalable, impactful reading product that helps us eradicate illiteracy in America.Illuminate Literacy is fiscally sponsored by Cambiar Education, a 501c3 that supports transformative leaders of public school systems and educational entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions that disrupt the patterns of educational inequity. Key Highlights
Two fully digital prototypes built and currently being tested with a dozen schools and out-of-school partners; MVP kindergarten offering will be released fall 2023
Fully-funded sister R&D organization, AERDF Reading Reimagined, to explore major unknowns in literacy learning for priority students and to bridge cutting-edge research to practice
Founding team with deep expertise in teaching kids to read, on technology, at scale, comprised of literacy experts, practitioners, designers, engineers, and former education systems leaders. Founded and led by Rebecca Kockler, former Assistant Superintendent of Academic Content for the Louisiana Department of Education and developer of the nationally recognized ELA Guidebooks
Extensive relationships with major systems leaders across the country requesting to be co-designers and first adopters; 100% retention of current partners year over year
Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and to an inclusive R&D and product development approach that centers Black, Latino and Native American students and those experiencing poverty


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