Manager, Software Engineering

About Ellucian Ellucian powers innovation for higher education, partnering with approximately 3,000 customers across 50 countries, serving more than 21 million students. Ellucian's AI-powered platform, trained on the richest dataset available in higher education, drives efficiency, personalized experiences, and strengthened engagement for all students, faculty and staff. Fueled by decades of experience with a singular focus on the unique needs of learning institutions, the Ellucian platform features best-in-class SaaS capabilities and delivers insights needed now and into the future. These solutions and services span the entire student lifecycle, including data-rich tools for student recruitment, enrollment, and retention to workforce analytics, fundraising, and alumni engagement. Ellucian's innovative solutions, vast ecosystem of partners and user community of more than 45,000 provides best practices leading to greater institutional success and achieving better student outcomes.

About The Opportunity

We are seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead and actively contribute to building and maintaining innovative, world-class SaaS solutions for higher education. This role combines people leadership with hands‑on technical guidance and requires operating effectively across both startup‑like, fast‑paced environments and large‑scale enterprise ecosystems - balancing speed, autonomy, and governance. You will bring a pragmatic, data‑driven approach to technical decision‑making, using metrics, observability, and AI‑assisted engineering practices to improve productivity, code quality, and delivery outcomes. You will collaborate closely with Product Management to align team priorities with the product roadmap, ensuring sound lifecycle practices, minimizing technical debt, and delivering high‑quality incremental value. The position requires strong communication skills for effective collaboration with clients, partners, and internal teams in an agile environment.

Where You Will Make an Impact

• Technical Vision and Strategy: Establish API‑first development norms while driving alignment with evolving architectural standards through refactoring and modernization initiatives across diverse technology stacks.
• Innovation & AI Adoption: Champion adoption of AI‑assisted development tools and workflows to improve engineering velocity, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance code quality.
• Engineering Excellence: Promote rigorous engineering practices, including code reviews, static analysis, test automation, and continuous integration to ensure high‑quality, maintainable systems.
• Data‑Driven Decision Making: Drive technical decisions using metrics, observability, and system insights, embedding a data‑driven culture in architecture, performance, and prioritization.
• Collaboration: Lead small, high‑performing teams while operating effectively within enterprise structures, making pragmatic trade‑offs between speed, scalability, and governance.
• Ownership and Accountability: Manage project timelines and deliverables, ensuring timely and high‑quality delivery.
• Problem Solving: Provide technical solutions to complex functional and performance issues.
• Requirements Gathering: Lead software requirements gathering, design discussions, and code reviews.
• Mentorship: Mentor and guide engineers, providing technical peer feedback.
• Estimation: Perform detailed estimations for roadmap tasks and initiatives.
• Technical User Stories: Translate functional requirements into technical tasks.
• Support Collaboration: Collaborate with support teams to troubleshoot and resolve issues.
• Adaptability: Embrace change and lead the team to adopt new technologies and practices.
• System Analysis: Analyze system features, integration, security, scalability, and performance requirements.
• Technology Evaluation: Guide teams in working across and modernizing multiple tech stacks (e.g., Java, Groovy, Node.js), ensuring consistency with organizational standards.
• People Management: Manage performance, hiring, and career growth for engineers.

What You Will Bring

• Experience: Minimum of 10+ years of professional software development experience.
• Data‑Driven Mindset: Demonstrated ability to use metrics, logs, and performance data to guide architectural and implementation decisions.
• Diverse Technical Expertise: Broad experience across multiple technology stacks such as Java, Groovy, Node.js, and modern frameworks, including hands‑on involvement in refactoring legacy systems toward modern architectures.
• Code Quality & Analysis: Strong experience in code reviews, static analysis, and continuous improvement practices to ensure maintainable, scalable, and high‑quality codebases.
• AI Tooling: Hands‑on experience leveraging AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., code generation, automated testing, code analysis) to improve engineering efficiency and quality.
• Cloud Services: Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services (e.g., Lambda, RDS, DMS, S3), containerization (Docker, ECS), and infrastructure‑as‑code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• DevOps Tools: Hands‑on experience with CI/CD tools and practices (Jenkins, Git, GitFlow), automated testing, and DevOps methodologies.
• Mentorship: Experience mentoring team members and leading technical discussions.
• Agile and DevOps: Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and DevOps processes including CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, Git, Terraform).
• Communication & Influence: Comfortable going deep in technical design discussions with engineers and equally effective simplifying complexity for senior stakeholders.
• Self‑Starter: Self‑starter with the ability to manage ambiguity and prioritize tasks effectively.
• Learning Mindset: Strong learning mindset and ability to adapt to evolving technologies and product needs.
• Enterprise Systems: Experience designing highly available, distributed, and scalable transactional enterprise systems – preferred.

What makes #Ellucianlife

• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision
• Flexible time off
• Thrive Flex Lifestyle Account (LSA) that allows you to contribute towards your health, financial or learning interests
• 401k w/ match & BrightPlan - to help you save for the future
• Parental Leave
• 5 charitable days to support the community that supports us
• Telemedicine
• Wellness
  • Headspace Care (mental health)
  • Wellbeats (virtual fitness classes)
• RethinkCare & Wellthy– caregiver support
• Diversity and inclusion programs which provide access to internal employee resource groups
• Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team
• We Foster a learning culture with:
  • Education Assistance Program
  • Professional development opportunities