Team Lead - Enterprise Systems Squad

For over two decades, BrainPOP has been trusted by educators and parents worldwide as a source of engaging and impactful learning experiences for all kids. With a presence in over two-thirds of U.S. districts through school and district subscriptions and an estimated annual reach of 25 million students, BrainPOP is empowering kids to take agency over their learning and excel in and out of the classroom.

The company was acquired in 2022 by KIRKBI, the family-owned holding and investment company of the LEGO brand, marking a significant milestone as their first acquisition in the digital learning realm. We are thrilled to continue making learning fun and accessible with the strategic guidance and support of KIRKBI.

BrainPOP is looking for an experienced Team Lead to guide our Enterprise Systems squad—a cross-functional team responsible for building and maintaining the CMS and content generation tools that power BrainPOP's educational content at scale. This role combines hands-on technical leadership, people mentorship, and pioneering AI adoption to transform how we create assessment items, reading materials, and multimedia assets.

You will lead the technical direction of our content production systems while championing AI innovation across the entire engineering organization.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership

• Provide hands-on technical guidance, mentorship, and direction.
• Lead code reviews to ensure high standards for quality, performance, and security.
• Own architectural decisions for CMS, content pipelines, and AI integration layers.
  
  

• Lead design and implementation of AI systems for scalable content production (e.g., assessments, reading materials).
• Champion AI adoption, new processes, and best practices across the engineering organization.
• Guide the team on prompt engineering, model evaluation, security, monitoring, and cost awareness.
• Serve as an AI thought leader, staying current with emerging developments.
  
  

• Own the technical direction of BrainPOP's CMS and content generation tools.
• Build systems that scale content production through intelligent automation and AI assistance.
  
  

• Work primarily with PHP (Laravel) and Node.js backend, and Vue.js frontend.
• Drive decisions around frameworks, libraries, AI tooling, and content management architecture.
  
  

• Partner with Content, Product, Design, and Data teams to translate needs into technical solutions.
• Participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and task allocation.
• Facilitate clear communication regarding goals, priorities, and technical trade-offs.
  
  

• Define testing strategies for both traditional and AI-powered systems, including content quality evaluation.
• Own observability (e.g., New Relic), focusing on AI system performance and cost monitoring.
• Resolve critical production issues affecting content creation workflows.
  
  

• Foster a positive, collaborative team culture and support team development.
• Maintain codebase health and improve development processes.
• Evangelize AI learnings across the engineering organization.
  
  

• 7+ years of professional software development experience.
• 2+ years in a technical leadership role (Team Lead, Tech Lead, or similar).
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/LLM solutions into production, particularly for content generation or creative workflows.
• Deep familiarity with AI concepts: prompt engineering, model evaluation, RAG architectures, or AI observability.
• Passion for exploring and implementing emerging AI technologies.
• Experience designing scalable, production-grade systems.
• Strong communication skills and ownership-driven mindset with a passion for mentoring.
  
  

• Background in CMS platforms, content management systems, or publishing workflows.
• EdTech or content-driven platform experience.
• Prior experience leading AI transformation initiatives or introducing AI tooling to engineering teams.