Director of DevSecOps

Job Description:

THE OPPORTUNITY

The Director of DevSecOps provides strategic leadership over infrastructure, operations, and security for the Education Engineering division at Scholastic. This role ensures high product availability, security, and reliability while optimizing operating costs. The Director will lead a team responsible for development and production environments, DevOps tooling, cloud infrastructure, and operational excellence, with a focus on supporting the successful launch and continuous evolution of Scholastic’s new Literacy Platform and digital products.

This role also oversees the Architecture Team, which includes four Architects responsible for applications security, data privacy, and system architecture. While not a hands-on contributor, the Director will provide technical direction, mentorship, and managerial oversight to ensure alignment with business and engineering goals.

The Director of DevSecOps plays a key role in incident response, including executive communications, root cause analysis, and retrospective discussions. Additionally, they will own the annual SOC 2 audit and contribute to vendor evaluations, security assessments, and infrastructure strategy.

The position reports to the Head of Education Engineering and collaborates closely with other engineering leaders, product owners, and business stakeholders to ensure seamless deployment of new features and products.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Define and drive the strategic direction of DevSecOps across multiple technical domains, balancing tactical and long-term objectives. Provide clear recommendations for infrastructure, operations, and security strategies.  Lead the operations strategy to support stable, secure, and efficient software deployment. Drive adoption of best practices and ensure high levels of reliability, availability, and performance. Own cloud infrastructure financial management, particularly AWS, ensuring cost optimization and compliance with financial commitments.

Build and lead a highly effective, multi-skilled team, fostering agility and collaboration. Ensure the team can quickly adapt to changes and provide top-tier operations support.

Partner with Scholastic’s broader technology teams to ensure alignment between processes, tools, and infrastructure, optimizing efficiency across engineering, security, and DevOps.

Guide application security and architecture strategy, providing mentorship and oversight to the Applications Security Architect and other team members.

Play a leadership role in incident management, ensuring proper response, resolution, and communication for production incidents affecting Scholastic’s digital products.

Support product owners with high-level project estimation and planning, sometimes in cases of limited initial details. Understand the strategic product plan and users’ needs and ensure the DevSecOps team is strategically positioned to support timely, stable deployments.

Participate in vendor due diligence, evaluating operational and security practices of potential vendors, guiding build vs. buy decisions, and advising on infrastructure and product implications.

About Scholastic

For more than 100 years, Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ: SCHL) has been meeting children where they are – at school, at home and in their communities – by creating quality content and experiences, all beginning with literacy. Scholastic delivers stories, characters, and learning moments that empower all kids to become lifelong readers and learners through bestselling children’s books, literacy- and knowledge-building resources for schools including classroom magazines, and award-winning, entertaining children's media. As the world's largest publisher and distributor of children's books through school-based book clubs and book fairs, classroom libraries, school and public libraries, retail, and online, and with a global reach into more than 135 countries, Scholastic encourages the personal and intellectual growth of all children, while nurturing a lifelong relationship with reading, themselves, and the world around them. Learn more at www.scholastic.com.

Some benefits that we offer:

• Full suite of health and wellness benefits (including a $0 deductible Medical Plan)

• Retirement Savings Plan 401(k) with options for both Roth and Traditional Contributions

• Tuition-Free programs for undergraduate and graduate degrees

• Generous Parental Leave Program

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with opportunity for discounted stock at a 15% discount

Thank you for your consideration in choosing Scholastic.

#LI-MV1

Qualifications

HOW YOU CAN FIT (Qualifications)

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Strong process orientation, ability to create and manage/optimize processes and apply continuous improvement practices, establish meaningful measurement and metric approaches.

• Strong leadership and management experience, with the ability to mentor and guide teams across infrastructure, DevOps, and security disciplines.

• Deep expertise in cloud computing, particularly AWS, including cost optimization and infrastructure automation.

• Strong understanding and ability to apply the principles of cybersecurity at the network, infrastructure, tech stack, and software development layers.

• Demonstrated success in building and optimizing CI/CD pipelines to improve software delivery speed and reliability.

• Strong understanding of Agile product development and DevOps/Site Reliability Engineering principles.

• Proven ability to support incident response, manage stakeholder communications, and lead root cause investigations.

• Strong grasp of security best practices across infrastructure, networks, and applications.

• Exceptional strategic thinking and decision-making skills, particularly in vendor evaluations and build vs. buy considerations.

• Excellent communication skills, including technical documentation, executive presentations, and cross-functional collaboration.

Experience and Education

Experience:

• Proven track record in technical leadership, having progressed from an individual contributor role (e.g., Principal Engineer, Senior Architect) to a management role.

• Experience in large-scale technology product development and delivery within an Agile environment.

• Minimum 3-5 years of people leadership experience, managing engineers and overseeing technical strategy, budgets, and performance management.

• Experience managing cloud infrastructure spend, vendor relationships, and security compliance.

Education:

BS in technical or engineering discipline or equivalent experience.

Time Type:Full timeJob Type:RegularJob Family Group:Information TechnologyLocation Region/State:New YorkCompensation Range:Annual Salary: 200,000.00 - 215,000.00EEO Statement:

Scholastic is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Our policy is clear: there shall be no discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, pregnancy, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, or status as a disabled veteran or Vietnam veteran. Those factors shall not influence the determination of qualifications for a job or other opportunity within the company. Further, all personnel actions (such as compensation, tuition aid, benefits, transfers, promotions, and dismissals, company-sponsored training, social and recreational programs) shall be administered without discrimination.

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EEO Scholastic Policy Statement

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