VP of Product Engineering

Clever is on a mission to connect every student to a world of learning. As the leading identity platform for education, more than 111,000 schools worldwide use Clever to power secure digital learning experiences. With Clever’s layered security solutions, schools can protect access and identities for all staff, teachers, and students. With a secure identity platform for schools and a network of leading application providers, Clever is committed to advancing education with technology that works for students everywhere.

Clever, a Kahoot! company, has an office in San Francisco, CA, but you can visit us at clever.com anytime.

About the Team & Opportunity

Clever is seeking a Vice President of Product Engineering to lead the teams that build what schools and application partners rely on every day. Clever is a two-sided platform. School districts of every size use us for identity management, SSO, and the portal students and teachers log into each morning, while thousands of edtech applications use our APIs to integrate with those schools.

You’ll lead five product engineering teams of about 40 engineers, building across the full stack on a container-based microservices architecture in AWS with Go, Node, and TypeScript. Reporting to the CTO and partnering as a peer with our VP of Product, you’ll own engineering’s half of product strategy and be a visible technical leader with the district CIOs and partner CTOs who choose Clever.

How You’ll Make an Impact

The problem you’ll solve:

Clever serves two very different customers on one platform. You’ll make sure what we build for districts and for application partners fits together, balancing immediate customer needs with the scale, resilience, and security that students depend on every school day.

Who you’ll partner with:

Your closest partner is our VP of Product, and together you’ll own the product and engineering roadmap. You’ll work alongside our Infrastructure, Data, and Security platform teams, and directly with customers: CIOs and CTOs at school districts, CTOs and chief customer officers at application partners, and their technical staff.

What success looks like:

A roadmap that Product and Engineering own together, predictable delivery on the work that matters most to customers, a strong bench of managers across all five teams, and AI built into how every team plans, builds, tests, and ships. You’ll know it’s working when customers ask for you by name and engineering is shaping strategy, not just receiving it.

Key projects you’ll lead:

You’ll lead how AI is applied across our software development lifecycle, from design and coding through testing, review, and release. You’ll set technical direction and architecture for Clever’s products and dig into our most complex systems to keep them sound. You’ll represent Clever in customer business reviews, at industry events, and in education technology standards groups.

What We’re Looking For

• Required Skills & Experience (Must-Haves)
• Technical leadership
• : You came up building software and can still go deep. You review designs, challenge architecture decisions, and earn the respect of senior engineers.
• Leading leaders
• : Has led a multi-team engineering organization of roughly 30 or more engineers through managers, including hiring and developing those managers and building an inclusive, high-performing culture.
• AI in the development lifecycle
• : Has led an engineering organization in applying AI across the software development lifecycle, changing how teams design, build, test, and ship, with results you can point to.
• Customer-facing products at scale
• : Has built and operated external, customer-facing SaaS products with high availability and resilience requirements, not only internal platforms or tooling.
• Product partnership
• : Has partnered with a product leader as a peer to set strategy and roadmap, not only to execute it.
• Customer engagement
• : Has worked directly with customers’ technical decision makers, such as CIOs, CTOs, or IT leaders, and turned that input into product and architecture decisions. Able to travel one to two times per quarter for company and customer meetings.
• Executive communication
• : Can explain technical strategy and tradeoffs clearly to executives, customers, and engineers alike.
• Experience
• : 10+ years as an engineering leader including at least 3+ years at the director level or higher.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Haves)

• Identity and access management
• : Experience building SSO, identity lifecycle, directory, rostering, or access management products.
• Two-sided platforms
• : Experience building platforms, developer ecosystems, or APIs that other companies build on.
• International growth
• : Experience building products for customers outside the U.S., including adapting them to local data privacy rules, languages, and regional requirements.
• Education
• : Experience in edtech, or building for K-12 or higher education institutions.
• Our stack
• : Hands-on familiarity with AWS, Go, Node, TypeScript, and container-based microservices.
• Regulated scale
• : Has scaled a platform to millions of daily users in a regulated industry such as education, healthcare, or finance.
• Industry presence
• : Participation in industry standards bodies, or representing an engineering organization through talks, writing, or advisory boards.