Software Developer Support Lead
Reports to: Director, Engineering - Digital Experience
Zaner-Bloser is an educational curricula and digital resources provider in language arts/literacy. Our flexible, customizable solutions support educators in their mission to help students learn. We provide distinctive and effective educational products and services to inspire all students to become lifelong learners and partner with educators to improve results in the classroom. With an ever-growing number of digital technologies and evolving research shaping the education landscape, Zaner-Bloser is committed to meeting schools’ needs today and in the future. As a Highlights Company, Zaner-Bloser is driven to always do what's right for children and to strive to make a significant contribution to their education.
Zaner-Bloser is an educational solutions company specializing in delivering explicit instruction and a solid academic foundation for PreK–6 students in reading, writing, grammar, spelling, handwriting, and vocabulary. Our digital and print programs include Superkids, Spelling Connections, Jump Into Writing!, Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, and more. As a member of the Highlights Family of Companies, we strive to always do what's right for children and make a significant contribution to their education. Visit zaner-bloser.com for more information.
The opportunity:
The Software Developer Support Lead directs a dedicated support team within the Zaner-Bloser Digital Product Development organization, with direct responsibility for keeping the learning software that teachers and students rely on reliable, secure, and well-supported in production. The role sits at the intersection of development and operations — owning defect triage and resolution, deployment coordination, security vulnerability remediation, and codebase maintenance — while providing the technical leadership that turns a distributed support team into a consistent, high-performing function.
Core Responsibilities:
- Establish and manage the support team by providing guidance, performing code reviews, coordinating deployments, and promoting reliable follow-through
- Work with the build team technical lead and stakeholders to ensure product quality, operational readiness, and clear support ownership
- Triage, debug and address defects originating in production and QA environments and/or delegate as needed
- Maintain code bases by ensuring that packages are up to date and that applications meet current security and supportability standards
- Develop high-quality, testable code
- Ensure that application code adheres to internally adopted patterns and styles, and meets functional, performance, and security requirements
- Participate on an Agile team, contribute to complexity and time estimates, identify risks, and contribute to discussions and commitments
- Work with an array of different technologies; able to multi-task and switch projects quickly
Leadership and Operating Expectations:
- Provide dependable leadership during deployments and release activities, ensuring appropriate coverage through validation, issue follow-up, and handoff as needed
- Communicate status, blockers, delays, and support risks clearly and early to teammates, QA, and stakeholders
- Help monitor and coordinate response to production alerts, queue or storage warnings, and other operational concerns before they become customer-facing issues
- Drive timely review, prioritization, and remediation planning for critical, high, and medium vulnerabilities in partnership with development and infrastructure teams
- Model strong day-to-day responsiveness, meeting engagement, documentation, and follow-through on commitments, action items, and required administrative or compliance tasks
Qualifications:
Required experience
- Angular 8+ experience (we are on version 19)
- ASP.Net Web Api
- HTML5/CSS3
- Entity Framework
- Dependency Injection
- Unit Testing and Mocking
- MSSQL
- Sql Profiler
- Familiar with at least one front-end unit testing framework
- Familiar with at least one end-to-end testing framework
- Microsoft Azure services
Preferred experience
- CI configuration such as Jenkins or Azure Dev Ops
- Postman
- In depth Azure experience with storage, functions, message queuing, API Management, app services
Your first few months will see you working with the digital product team and:
- Building a thorough understanding of our systems and software alongside the technical lead
- Fostering a close working relationship with our IT department to understand infrastructure and other company-wide technology requirements
- Gathering insight from our Customer Experience and Digital Solutions specialists to understand customer needs and expectations
- Collaborating with the product owner and technical lead on a long-term support roadmap
Skills Required
- Angular 8 or later experience
- ASP.NET Web API experience
- HTML5 and CSS3 experience
- Entity Framework experience
- Dependency Injection experience
- Unit testing and mocking experience
- Microsoft SQL Server experience
- SQL Profiler experience
- Familiarity with at least one front-end unit testing framework
- Familiarity with at least one end-to-end testing framework
- Microsoft Azure services experience
- CI configuration experience such as Jenkins or Azure DevOps
- Postman experience
- In-depth Azure experience with storage, functions, message queuing, API Management, and App Services
What We Do
Highlights for Children is a family media and children’s publishing brand creating magazines, books, puzzles, learning resources and digital experiences for children. Since 1946, its “Fun with a Purpose” content has aimed to help children grow into their best selves by encouraging creativity and imagination, strengthening reading, thinking and reasoning skills, and fostering respect, kindness and sensitivity. Its offerings also include subscription boxes, apps, games and other activities.
