Lead Content Engineer

Lead Content Engineer, Create

College Board - Technology

Location: This is a remote role. Candidates who live near CB offices have the option of being fully remote or hybrid (Tuesday and Wednesday in office). All CB employees are required to occasionally travel to meet in person for business purposes.

Role Type: This is a full-time position

About the Team

The Content Engineering team sits within a multidisciplinary technology team that integrates design, content, and engineering to deliver consistent, scalable user experiences. We support structured content models, authoring ecosystems, metadata standards, and content workflows that power College Board’s digital products and websites.

Our team partners with platform product leadership and serves a broad community of content creators, including assessment and item authors and developers. We aim to unify practices, strengthen the discipline, and support content systems that are robust, maintainable, and flexible for the future.

About the Opportunity  

The Lead Content Engineer leads the design, governance, and evolution of structured exam content and metadata across the full assessment lifecycle within College Board item creation systems and with external and internal consumers. This role drives standards compliance, interchange status and metadata alignment across a complex ecosystem.

Operating at the intersection of content strategy, data modeling, and technical specification, this role establishes shared structures and terminology, aligns disparate authoring tools within a common architecture, and ensures content can function seamlessly as both machine-readable data and human-consumable artifacts.

The role's near-term priority is content standards and interchange: defining ingestion and translation layers for QTI and related edtech content standards, allowing us to integrate with external vendors and customers, and supporting the development of a global item bank crossing our various assessments. This role partners with content or domain experts, and owns the schema, standards, and translation architecture that make migrations correct and repeatable, and that allows consistent internal interchange of items and item metadata. 

This is a systems leadership role with enterprise impact.

In this role, you will: 

Own content interchange architecture (30%)

• Take responsibility for quality and integrity for exchange of item and other assessment content between College Board and external or legacy systems, grounded in QTI and related edtech content standards.

• Lead near-term content migrations from several vendors and legacy systems, partnering with a content or domain expert who owns subject-matter accuracy while this role owns schema mapping, structural validation, and standards compliance.

• Lead evolution of a unified content model to support the development of universal item bank, as a common directory of metadata and content. 

• Design translation layers as reusable interchange capabilities rather than one-off interfaces, so future providers and systems can extend the same pattern.

• Define validation checkpoints that catch structural or metadata loss during interchange or translation, before content reaches production.

• Represent College Board in relevant edtech standards groups, tracking and influencing the evolution of standards as they affect the platform.

Define and evolve metadata standards (30%)

• Analyze, compare and identify gaps in existing schemas for item, form and course metadata. 

• Develop structured content specifications that support downstream form assembly, assignment, scoring, and reporting systems.

• Ensure interoperability and security across applications and platforms through consistent data modeling and governance.

• Balance machine-readable formats, such as JSON, with human-readable outputs for stakeholder validation and quality assurance.

• Support practical usage and development based on stakeholder needs and system evolution.

Maintain metadata integrity (30%)

• Ensure consistency and correctness of metadata from item authoring through form build, assignment, scoring, and score reporting. Diagnose problems and create tickets.

• Anticipate and mitigate structural risks before they affect production or stakeholder trust.

• Define quality checkpoints and validation mechanisms across the content lifecycle.

Cross-functional influence (10%)

• Act as a strategic liaison between content teams, engineering, psychometrics, scoring, reporting, and platform stakeholders.

• Communicate complex data structures in clear, actionable terms for both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Lead alignment efforts when standards or system changes affect multiple teams.

• Work closely with the platform Content Engineering Director to support external interchanges and interfaces.

 About You

• 5+ years of experience in structured content systems, assessment production, publishing technology, or comparable environments.

• Deep understanding of metadata modeling, content schemas, and data governance, especially in the assessment space.

• Direct experience with QTI or a comparable edtech content interchange standard, including export/import translation between systems with different content models.

• Experience working with machine-readable formats, such as JSON and XML, and system integrations.

• Proven ability to define standards and drive cross-team adoption in complex ecosystems.

• Strong systems thinking and precision in terminology and specification writing.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

• The ability to travel 2-4 times a year to College Board offices or on behalf of College Board business.

Nice-to-Have: 

• Experience in large-scale assessment or high-stakes exam production environments.

• Familiarity with item banking, form assembly tools, scoring workflows, and reporting systems.

• Experience aligning multiple legacy tools or workflows under a unified data model.

• Active participation in edtech standards bodies or working groups, such as those governing QTI.

• Exposure to automation, validation frameworks, or content engineering best practices.

All roles at College Board require:

• A passion for expanding educational and career opportunities and mission-driven work

• Curiosity and enthusiasm for emerging technologies, with a willingness to experiment with and adopt new AI-driven solutions and comfort with learning and applying new digital tools independently and proactively. 

• Clear and concise communication skills, written and verbal

• A learner's mindset and a commitment to growth: welcoming diverse perspectives, giving and receiving timely, respectful feedback, and continuously improving through iterative learning and user input.

• A drive for impact and excellence: solving complex problems, making data-informed decisions, prioritizing what matters most, and continuously improving through learning, user input, and external benchmarking.

• A collaborative and empathetic approach: working across differences, fostering trust, and contributing to a culture of shared success.

• Authorization to work in the United States

About Our Process  

• Application review will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.

• While the hiring process may vary, it generally includes: resume and application submission, recruiter phone/video screen, hiring manager interview, performance exercise, a panel interview, a conversation with leadership and reference checks. 

What We Offer

• At College Board, we offer more than a paycheck: we provide a meaningful career, a supportive team, and a comprehensive package designed to help you thrive. We’re a self-sustaining nonprofit that believes in fair and competitive compensation grounded in your qualifications, experience, impact, and the market.

A Thoughtful Approach to Compensation

• The hiring range for this role is $80,000–$140,000.

• Your exact salary will depend on your location, experience, and how your background compares to others in similar roles at the College Board.

• We aim to make our best offer upfront, rooted in fairness, transparency, and market data.

• We adjust salaries by location to ensure fairness, no matter where you live.

You’ll have open, transparent conversations about compensation, benefits, and what it’s like to work at College Board throughout your hiring process. Check out our careers page for more.

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