VP Engineering Comm Platform – Westchester, IL

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position Overview:

Follett Higher education is a leading educational service provider and omnichannel retailer, providing students, faculty, staff, parents, and fans with the course materials, learning tools, and retail services needed to successfully support the collegiate journey. Follett Higher Education supports over 6 million students through its 1,100 physical and 1,750 eCommerce campus stores across North America.

This is a high-visibility opportunity to lead a commerce platform transformation on a national scale. The VP of Engineering, Commerce Platform owns the technical strategy, architecture, and delivery of Follett’s ecommerce and point of sale systems, including the ongoing migration from a legacy technology stack to Shopify. This role has final architectural authority over the platform, impacting how millions of students and fans shop and pay for years to come.

The VP brings deep technical credibility, setting direction with conviction, and earning trust across engineering teams. Application Development, QA, and DevOps all report into this role. The VP partners closely with the SVP of Ecommerce, who owns product management and business decisions for ecommerce, while this role owns how those decisions get built, scaled, and operated.

This role owns engineering culture, building a team where engineers own outcomes in partnership with product and leadership, rather than simply executing requirements handed to them.

Responsibilities:

Platform Architecture & Migration

• Own end-to-end architecture for ecommerce and POS systems, including the transition from legacy stack to Shopify.
• Set technical direction and make final architecture calls across the environment, driving toward the organization’s go-forward technology stack.
• Act as the subject-matter expert across the modern ecommerce technology stack, including loyalty programs, promotions and pricing engines, and analytics/personalization platforms, to inform architecture decisions that scale across the Follett store network.
• Maintain technical standards and architectural integrity across the engineering organization.

• Lead Application Development, QA, and DevOps teams, setting delivery standards and technical practices across all three functions.
• Ensure platform performance, instrumentation, scalability, reliability, and availability to meet the needs of the business and its institutional and student customers.
• Drive modern engineering practices appropriate to the team’s scale and maturity.
• Own technology lifecycle decisions, including system upgrades, platform migrations, and modernization efforts within ecommerce and POS.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with the SVP of Ecommerce on roadmap sequencing, tradeoffs, and prioritization, co-owning outcomes while maintaining clear decision rights between technical execution and business/product ownership.
• Work across engineering, sales, institutional partners, and operations to balance platform modernization with ongoing academic-calendar-driven operational needs.
• Serve as the technical voice in cross-functional planning for ecommerce and POS initiatives.

Engineering Culture & Talent Leadership

• Build, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering organization across App Dev, QA, and DevOps.
• Foster a culture of ownership, where teams partner with product and leadership to own outcomes rather than only executing requirements.
• Establish clear performance expectations and growth paths for engineering leaders and their teams.
• Raise the bar for technical hiring across the organization.

Secure Development & Risk Awareness

• Ensure secure development and deployment practices are embedded in engineering workflows, in partnership with the separate security/compliance function that owns security overall.
• Maintain working knowledge of data privacy and security considerations relevant to ecommerce and POS systems (e.g., PII handling, data residency) to inform architecture decisions.

• Bachelor’s degree in related field or equivalent
• 12–15+ years in software engineering, including 5–7+ years in senior engineering leadership (Director, VP, or Head of Engineering) managing multiple teams through leads and managers.
• Direct ecommerce software engineering experience, having built or scaled systems for online storefronts, checkout, cart, or order management.
• Proven experience leading a legacy-to-modern platform migration.
• Expert fluency in modern web technology and architecture patterns.
• Experience owning DevOps/CI-CD and QA functions as part of an engineering organization, not app development alone.
• Demonstrated track record of building engineering teams with a strong culture of ownership.

Preferred

• Shopify experience, whether platform architecture, app development, or merchant-side engineering leadership.
• Retail or ecommerce industry background, with collegiate or course materials retail experience being a stronger plus than general retail.
• Point-of-sale (POS) systems experience.
• Master’s degree in technical or business field.