Magic Edtech - Vice President - Engineering

Experience :15-20 Years

Role Overview:

We are seeking a strategic, hands-on Vice President of Engineering to lead engineering delivery, architecture, and technology execution for strategic customer accounts. This leader will bring a strong full-stack engineering background, deep architecture expertise, and a technology-agnostic mindset that prioritizes business outcomes over platform preference.

The ideal candidate is forward-looking, highly credible with executive stakeholders, and experienced in applying Agentic AI and emerging engineering approaches to improve service delivery, scalability, and operational efficiency. This role requires exceptional communication, mature governance leadership, and the ability to manage escalations with sound judgment, balance, and customer empathy.

This role will take ownership at the customer account level, helping strengthen relationships, expand strategic influence, and drive growth. In parallel, the candidate will provide leadership to the internal Technology CoE to capture best practices across customers and drive AI adoption, improve team productivity, consistency, reusability, and excellence in delivery approaches.

Key Responsibilities:

- Provide engineering leadership across engineering, solution architecture, and service delivery functions.

- Define and drive scalable, resilient, and future-ready architecture strategies aligned to customer and business goals.

- Leverage a strong full-stack engineering foundation to guide teams across frontend, backend, platform, integration, cloud, data, and DevOps domains.

- Remain technology agnostic, evaluating tools, frameworks, and platforms based on fit-for-purpose, speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.

- Lead the adoption of modern engineering practices and forward-looking delivery models, including practical use of Agentic AI to enhance service delivery, productivity, automation, decision support, and customer outcomes.

- Partner with customers at the VP and CXO level, building trusted relationships and serving as a strategic engineering counterpart.

- Take ownership at the customer account level, aligning technology strategy and delivery with customer priorities while identifying opportunities to deepen engagement and drive account growth.

- Lead governance conversations with clarity and authority, including delivery reviews, risk management, architecture decisions, and operational performance discussions.

- Own and manage escalations end-to-end, bringing a balanced view that considers customer expectations, business priorities, delivery realities, and team health.

- Drive engineering excellence through strong operating mechanisms, delivery discipline, quality standards, and measurable outcomes.

- Provide leadership to the internal Technology Center of Excellence (CoE) to collect, refine, and scale best practices across all customers.

- Drive consistency of approach across accounts by standardizing engineering patterns, governance models, reusable assets, and architecture principles where appropriate.

- Coach and develop engineering leaders and teams, fostering accountability, innovation, and a high-performance culture.

- Collaborate cross-functionally with product, delivery, customer success, sales, and executive leadership to ensure aligned execution.

- Identify risks early and proactively define mitigation plans across architecture, execution, staffing, quality, and stakeholder management.

Required Experience and Qualifications:

- Proven experience in a senior engineering leadership role such as VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or equivalent.

- Strong background in software architecture with the ability to guide enterprise-scale, distributed, and customer-facing systems.

- Prior hands-on experience as a full-stack engineer or engineering leader with broad technical depth across modern application stacks.

- Demonstrated ability to lead in a technology-agnostic environment and make pragmatic platform and architecture decisions.

- Experience applying Agentic AI, AI-assisted engineering, or intelligent automation in service delivery, engineering operations, or customer solution environments.

- Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical topics for executive and non-technical audiences.

- Strong executive presence and experience engaging directly with customer VP/CXO stakeholders.

- Experience leading governance calls, steering committees, or executive delivery reviews.

- Proven capability in managing critical escalations with composure, transparency, and balanced decision-making.

- Strong commercial awareness and ability to align engineering decisions to customer value, business outcomes, and delivery commitments.

- Experience owning or influencing customer accounts, including growing strategic relationships and identifying expansion opportunities.

- Track record of contributing to or leading a Technology CoE, engineering standards function, or cross-account best practice initiative.

- Track record of building and leading high-performing engineering organizations across multiple programs, products, or accounts.

Preferred Attributes:

- Forward-looking thinker with a strong point of view on the future of engineering, architecture, and AI-enabled delivery.

- Comfortable operating at both strategic and tactical levels, from executive discussions to deep technical reviews.

- Calm, credible, and solutions-oriented under pressure.

- Highly collaborative leader who can influence across customer organizations and internal teams.

- Strong judgment, empathy, and the ability to navigate competing priorities with fairness and clarity.

- A mindset of reuse and standardization, with the ability to convert distributed customer learnings into scalable organizational best practices.