Lead Software Developer

About SANS

Founded in 1989, SANS Institute (SANS) began as a cooperative research and education organization. Over the next 25 years, it grew to become the most trusted and widely recognized provider of information security training and certification in the world. Today, SANS has served more than 300,000 cybersecurity professionals around the world, with more than 60,000 earning Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC) security certifications—the leading certification that provides assurance to employers that their people and prospective hires can do the job.

At SANS, our culture is defined by three pillars:
Mission, Brand, and People.

• Our Mission is to hire people who understand the importance fighting against cybersecurity threats.
• Our Brand reflects a commitment to delivering the highest quality training.
• Our People are grounded in a culture of fairness, honesty, customer focus, and a pragmatic approach.

The Lead Software Developer will play a key leadership role in designing, developing, and maintaining the next generation of SANS e-learning and cybersecurity training platforms. This position combines deep technical expertise with strategic vision and collaboration across teams to deliver robust, scalable, and secure digital learning solutions. The ideal candidate is a seasoned architect with strong experience in e-learning technologies, modern web application frameworks, and cloud architecture and who thrives in an environment where education and cybersecurity intersect.

The architect will own the technical vision for this new product and lead a cross‑functional engineering organization through execution. This is a senior technical leadership role who has already led platform‑scale technical transformations, managed engineering teams, and operated as a trusted partner to executive stakeholders.

• Define and own the end-to-end technical architecture for SANS’s next-generation e-learning platform, including content delivery, learner experiences, virtual labs, and commerce infrastructure.
• Make binding architectural decisions on system decomposition, API design, data modeling, event-driven patterns, and cloud-native infrastructure—with full accountability for outcomes.
• Establish and enforce architectural standards, design review processes, and technical governance across multiple engineering teams.
• Lead build-vs-buy evaluations and vendor technical assessments for platform components (LMS, CMS, payment systems, identity providers).
• Integrate APIs and tools that support SCORM, xAPI, LTI, and other interoperability standards for learning management systems (LMS).

• Directly lead and mentor a team of senior and mid-level engineers, with accountability for their technical growth, career development, and performance.
• Conduct architecture reviews, code reviews, and design critiques that raise the engineering bar across the organization.
• Recruit, evaluate, and onboard senior engineering talent; actively shape the team’s composition and capabilities.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence: rigorous testing, observability, documentation, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as a technical escalation point for complex engineering problems across teams.

• Partner directly with Product, UX, Cybersecurity SMEs, and executive leadership to translate business strategy into technical roadmaps.
• Communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and technical risk to non-technical stakeholders with clarity and conviction.
• Drive alignment across competing priorities between product, infrastructure, security, and operations teams.
• Present technical strategy and progress to VP/C-level audiences; build confidence in the engineering organization’s ability to deliver.
• Navigate organizational complexity—influence without authority, build consensus, manage technical debt negotiations.

• Architect scalable, maintainable, and secure systems that support thousands of concurrent learners and complex content delivery pipelines.
• Enhance user…