Lead Engineer, Secure Client Engineering

Role Description

As a Lead Engineer on the Secure Client Engineering team, you will play a hands-on role in protecting the integrity of Bluebook, the application students rely on for digital assessments across Windows, macOS, iPad, and ChromeOS.

You’ll provide technical leadership by guiding architecture and design decisions, setting a high bar for engineering quality, and mentoring teammates, while remaining deeply involved in implementation.

You’ll work close to the operating system, leveraging native platform capabilities to tackle complex, low-level challenges at the intersection of software engineering and security.

This role is built for engineers who thrive on hard problems without clear answers, combining deep technical expertise with sound judgment to design resilient client-side protections in an ever-evolving landscape.

In this role, you will:

• Design & Implementation (70%):
  • Collaborate daily with other engineers on the team using mob programming to solve complex technical problems through software engineering while guiding approaches and unblocking the team.
  • Maintain the highest engineering standards in collaboration across teams with product owners, architects, and stakeholders, in support of our systems and services.
  • Use your deep understanding of the applications within the Digital Assessment Platform to drive the design and implementation of novel solutions to security challenges in desktop and mobile applications, across Windows, MacOS, iOS, and ChromeOS.
  • Lead by example in writing code for both native and web environments, building component-based, performant, stable, and secure solutions with a focus on lower-level code that interfaces with the native operating system.
  • Understand new product requirements and lead the decomposition of the work into well-defined functional changes for verification.
• Team Operations & Success (30%):
  • Drive continuous improvement of the team’s engineering practices, efficiency, speed, and quality.
  • Lead and influence discussions on architecture, testing strategies, developer experience, security, performance, and resilience.
  • Lead and contribute to code and design reviews, setting quality standards and providing actionable feedback to elevate the team.
  • Lead the investigation and resolution of complex production issues, ensuring root causes are understood and addressed.
  • Champion and evolve development standards and security policies, ensuring consistent adoption across the team.
  • Drive the adoption of AI-augmented and agentic engineering practices, establishing effective patterns for rapidly implementing, testing, and delivering high-quality code based within the team’s collaborative engineering model.
  • Continuously develop and share skills needed to thrive in a poly-skilled, increasingly AI-native engineering environment.
  • Evaluate and introduce new methods and tools, guiding adoption to improve team effectiveness in a post-agile environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production level software development experience, with a significant portion spent on native desktop or platform-level applications.
• Deep, hands-on experience with native Windows development, including working directly with lower level operating system APIs, memory, processes, and/or kernel-level interfaces.
• Strong proficiency in C++ for production systems, including experience with lower-level Windows development such as Win32 APIs, kernel-mode components, or driver development.
• Proficiency in reviewing and improving code structure and architecture for testability, maintainability, and scalability.
• Familiarity with cloud-based development workflows, including version control in GitHub and basic exposure to AWS or similar cloud platforms.
• A love of learning and a growth mindset.
• An openness and genuine enthusiasm to mob programming as a primary working mode.
• Strong problem-solving skills, leading efforts to tackle complex technical challenges.
• Strong technical research skills as it pertains to quickly building a working understanding of large open source repositories.
• Experience defining engineering standards and leading code and design reviews.
• Proven ability to introduce and drive adoption of new ideas.
• Effective communicator and technical leader.
• Ability to travel 3-5 times a year to our NYC or Reston, VA office.

Requirements

• Experience developing anti-cheat controls in video game or similar software.
• Experience building resilient client-side systems in adversarial or security-sensitive environments.
• Comfort with low-level debugging, reviewing assembly, understanding of the low-level components of native development.

Benefits

• A meaningful career, a supportive team, and a comprehensive package designed to help you thrive.
• Fair and competitive compensation grounded in your qualifications, experience, impact, and the market.
• Open, transparent conversations about compensation, benefits, and what it’s like to work at College Board.