D2L Careers
Engineering and Product
Our Technology, Engineering, Design and Product groups work to scale and develop the company’s industry-leading learning solutions. The team operates on a three-legged stool model consisting of Developers, Product Managers, and Product Designers to collaborate to work on a product roadmap and develop a world class Learning Management platform. Interested in learning more?
How does Engineering and Product make an impact at D2L?
Our development teams are working with innovative technology stack using AWS (Amazon Web Services) tools and microservices along with following two-week agile sprints to ensure timely delivery of the product. Our product team enables departments across D2L to make data driven decisions and follow industry best practices to do the best work of their lives.
Engineering Team
Platform Development
Foundation
User Experience Development and Design
IT
Information Security
Platform Development
The Platform group consists of a wide variety of teams that support the performance of the Brightspace learning platform, its data products and the integrated solutions that contribute to the broader partner and client ecosystem.
Foundation
We enable our teams to deliver their features in the Brightspace platform by ensuring that they have all the necessary infrastructure, observability tools, delivery pipelines and cost models in place. We do this by designing, developing, and maintaining automations for building, testing and deploying our software onto our critical infrastructure components, as well as tracking the overall cost and health of our system, mitigating any issues and scaling effectively.
Furthermore, with a deep understanding of our application and how it interacts with our infrastructure and Cloud services, we are making the Brightspace application more performant, more secure and use a smaller footprint by taking advantage of the latest advances in Cloud computing. We do this by making transformational changes to our application, such as adding multi-tenancy, interfacing with Cloud-native backends, and the capability for deployment into Cloud-native compute mechanisms.
User Experience Development and Design
The User Experience Development and Design (UXD) team focuses on users. With a deep empathy for learners and educators, they build experiences that foster lifelong learning for everyone. UXD includes our product design, user research, and accessibility specialists. It also includes teams building our core web platform and activity model, core experiences, strategic differentiators, targeted solutions, emerging solutions, and mobile applications.
IT
The Information Technology team partner with stakeholders to deploy services and technology that will enable D2Ler’s to increase productivity, communicate, and securely share and store information to achieve D2L’s business goals.
Information Security
The Information Security team at D2L has a mandate to ensure the security and privacy of information/data related to D2L’s products, services and employees.
We work to ensure we are protecting the availability, integrity and confidentiality of D2L’s services and data by taking an active role in preventing potential security threats, resolving active security incidents, and improving our security practices.
Product Team
Product Operations
Corporate Program Management
User Experience Development and Design
Product Management
Release and Transition
Business Intelligence
Product Operations
Product operations exists to help D2L sustainably deliver on commitments – providing practices, processes, tools, and data needed for teams to do the best work of their lives. The department also leads product planning and launches, building cross organizational bridges so that we operate as one D2L.
Corporate Program Management
The Corporate Program Management Office (PMO) is comprised of charismatic leaders who passionately and relentlessly drive key business outcomes through some of D2Ls most complex initiatives. The PMO ensures a coordinated, company-wide approach to successfully execute a highly complex cross-functional portfolio of high profile, high impact programs.
User Experience Development and Design
The User Experience Development and Design (UXD) team focuses on users. With a deep empathy for learners and educators, they build experiences that foster lifelong learning for everyone. UXD includes our product design, user research, and accessibility specialists. It also includes teams building our core web platform and activity model, core experiences, strategic differentiators, targeted solutions, emerging solutions, and mobile applications.
Product Management
Our Product Management Team builds and launches products with our partners in development and design. Our product development teams are organized to have a Product Manager, Development Manager, and Designer leading efforts together in what we call a “Three-Legged Stool.” This team of leaders has autonomy to organize and execute their work in the way that works best for their team, the product, and the market. Teams are encouraged to find user problems and solve them, to use data in their decision making, and to ensure that teams are happy, healthy, and productive. We strive to foster an environment where ideas can be challenged openly, where teams have the safety to try something new, where failure is treated as a learning opportunity, and where everyone comes to do the best work of their lives.
Release and Transition
There are two main functions on this team – Release and Client Transition. Overall, the objective of the team is to support bringing new products, features, and fixes to the market, and to help transition customers off of legacy products and services onto new solutions.
Business Intelligence
The Business Intelligence (BI) team enables data driven decisions across D2L, makes data more available and accessible, and supports employees with their data needs. While BI is an internal facing team, some of their data supports external facing services and products (e.g. Pulse, Salesforce). They offer assistance with getting data, accessing data, and data consulting.
Unique Activities or Events
One important way our Technology, Engineering, Design (TED) teams are #ExcellentToEachOther is by being curious and learning from each other. There are so many ways to get involved in TED to learn more about colleagues, strengthen your skills, and take advantage of opportunities for professional development. Below are a few unique activities that our development teams run on a timely basis.
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Dragon Slayer occurs twice a year and allows developers to catch up on issues that need to be fixed (e.g. bug fixes). Dragon Slayer helps to ensure the health and wellbeing of our technology assets and allows individuals to become experts in the code that you own or learn more about code lines that you don’t normally work with.
Inspiration also occurs twice a year and gives developers an opportunity to become creative. Developers are given the freedom to test ideas, post their ideas on internal portal, and work with other developers from any team. After the two weeks, some ideas are run by the Product Management and Development teams and may get’s implemented!
InFUSION started in 2015 and is our annual internal conference in TED. It is three jam-packed days that brings together all members of TED for peer-to-peer learning, team building, collaboration, reflecting and celebrating our accomplishments! It has grown to include Product Management and a few others who support the TED group.
The goal of the conference is to share experiences from our talented team members across all departments in our organization through face-to-face conversations and networking.
The conference includes external keynote speakers and hands-on workshops, breakout sessions across several streams – technical, business, management, etc.
New Software Developers and Testers participate in structured technical training and ‘getting started’ onboarding. This is typically a 5-day program, with a mix of synchronous and asynchronous leaning.
During these meetings, our team takes time to learn from each other, either in small chunks as “Five Minutes Flares” or in larger presentations. We invite guests both internal and external to join. Most recently, our team learned about more effective and faster decision making from an expert in organizational behavior, heard the career story of our VP of Solutions Engineering, and learned about some automation changes coming to one of our documentation processes.
Leadership
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Stephen Laster
President
Stephen Laster
PresidentAt D2L, Stephen leads D2L’s strategy, product, services, sales, and marketing teams, working alongside Founder and CEO John Baker. He is focused on delivering world-class product and customer experiences that enable D2L’s customers to reimagine learning.
Stephen has over 25 years of leadership experience in digital transformation, product development and technology enablement. Before joining D2L, Stephen was the Chief Product Officer of Ellucian, the market-leading student information system provider for global higher education. Prior to Ellucian, Stephen held critical roles including Chief Product Officer for Penn Foster, Chief Digital Officer for McGraw Hill Education, and Chief Information Officer for the Harvard Business School. He also served as a Trustee, member of the faculty, and head of innovation for Babson College. Previously, Stephen founded and ran Intelligent Solutions, LLC, a higher education technology consulting firm. Stephen has been a board member of IMS Global, Microsoft Higher Education Advisory Board, The Online Learning Consortium, and FineTune Learning.
Stephen holds a bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College and an MBA from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts with his wife Debi and their two children.
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Nick Oddson
Chief Technology Officer
Nick Oddson
Chief Technology OfficerAs its chief technology officer, Nick brings over 20 years of design and enterprise-level software experience to his role with D2L. He leads the product team as they continue to scale and develop the company’s industry-leading learning solutions.
Before joining D2L, Nick was SVP of research and development for Open Text Corporation. He supervised an engineering organization of more than 1,000 employees distributed globally across 40 offices as the company scaled through significant acquisitions. During that time, Nick worked to drive common technology approaches, efficiency, and KPIs in product teams, and deeper integration between product portfolios.
Nick continues to support technology start-ups locally (previously through work on the Communitech board and various programs like Hyperdrive and VeloCity), with the goal to contribute to the next generation of sustainable and inclusive software companies and the evolution of our unique region in Canada. In 2013, he was awarded the Region of Waterloo’s Top 40 Under 40 Award in recognition of his contributions to the arts and technology communities.
Nick studied computer science and physics at the University of Waterloo.
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Christian Pantel
Senior Vice President, User Experience Design and Product Development
Christian Pantel
Senior Vice President, User Experience Design and Product DevelopmentAs senior vice president, user experience design and product development, at D2L, Christian leads teams of UX researchers, product designers, developers, testers, and accessibility specialists in all D2L’s locations.
In the design and development of products, Christian’s focus is on users. With deep empathy for learners and educators, D2L delivers user experiences that support lifelong learning for everyone. During his more than six years at D2L, Christian has led a transformation of Brightspace. Always known as a full-featured and flexible learning platform, Brightspace is now also recognized for its modern and intuitive user interface.
Christian has over 20 years of experience designing and building software at notable enterprise software companies, including Workday, Infor, and PeopleSoft. Christian earned a Master of Science in computing science from Simon Fraser University, specializing in human-computer interaction and Web-based learning environments. He also holds a Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) from the University of Manitoba. Christian lives in Winnipeg with his wife and four children.
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Rajesh Talpade
Senior Vice President of Product Management
Rajesh Talpade
Senior Vice President of Product ManagementRajesh Talpade is SVP of Product Management. He brings more than 25 years of leadership experience in product management, operations, innovation, and consulting at startups through large companies across multiple industry sectors in B2B, B2B2C and B2C markets.
Before joining D2L in 2022, Rajesh was Senior Vice President of Product at MasterControl leading Product Management and Design. He also worked at Google for six years on Mobile Ads products and Network Management products for the largest global IP network.
This experience is built on a PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Columbia University. Rajesh resides in New Jersey with his wife and is a father of two children. He enjoys challenging hikes, reading fiction and history, and advising socially impactful startups.
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Melissa Crouch
VP, Product Operations
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Juno Jesuthasan
VP, Information Technology
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Matt Campbell
VP, Cloud Platform
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Tanya Chisholm
Senior Director, Client Transitions
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Jeremy Weinstein
Senior Director, Program Management, Corporate PMO
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Dana Frigula
Senior Director, Business Intelligence
Interested in learning more about a career in Engineering and Product at D2L?