Director, Software Engineering

Over the last 10+ years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the administrators, teachers, and specialists who support English Learners. Today, nearly 2,000 school districts use our software to manage their EL programs. We are a successful, growing business with a real mission: helping English Learners achieve their highest aspirations.

Districts across the country rely on Ellevation for the daily workflows that keep those programs running and the student data behind every instructional decision, and we earn that trust through what we build. We’re building a platform that is secure by design and fast to work on, and engineering practices that let eight squads ship with confidence. Much of that is still unbuilt. We want leaders who study how we work today, find the gaps we haven’t seen yet, and then design and build the systems, practices, and team that close them.

Ellevation operates as part of Curriculum Associates (“CA”) which provides several shared functions across all of its business units, including a centralized security organization. Ellevation runs its own R&D organization including engineering, product, and design; CA supplies scanning, security tooling, reporting, and KPIs.

Ellevation R&D spans engineering, product, and design, organized into eight product squads. Each squad owns its product area end to end and moves quickly within it. The work that spans squads, such as platform modernization, authentication, dependency currency, and security, needs deliberate ownership to move at the same pace.

About The Role

This is a senior role in R&D, and its impact reaches everything Ellevation builds. You’ll see across all eight squads, spot the problems and opportunities that sit where their work meets, and make a case for which of them matter most to the business. Platform modernization, authentication, dependency health, and security are where that work starts today, and you’ll shape what comes next.

You’ll lead a team of Staff Engineers who drive critical parts of this work, making the case for where their time goes and making sure every initiative has a clear owner, a plan the squads can work with, and an agreed outcome. We expect to grow the team over time, and you’ll shape and lead that hiring.

Your impact scales through your team. Our Staff Engineers work across squads, partnering with engineering managers and product leads to move shared work forward within real squad capacity. You'll help them choose the right problems, sequence work across the organization, and grow as technical leaders. You'll stay close enough to the technical detail to judge tradeoffs and stand behind your team's decisions.

Security is a core part of this portfolio, and we want a leader with meaningful security experience to own it. You'll lead security practice at Ellevation, working with CA on the standards, SLAs, and KPIs we're measured against and making sure Ellevation meets them. You'll also be a key liaison to CA's central security organization.

You’ll be accountable for the results of this work. That means weighing what should be fixed now, what can wait, and what isn’t worth doing, then recommending a path and explaining why it matters for the business. Security findings, CA’s standards, and Ellevation’s product priorities all compete for the same R&D time, and you’ll make the case for how to balance them. That includes making CA’s scanning, tooling, and reporting work for how Ellevation builds software, and representing Ellevation in CA’s security forums.

Deciding what to take on each cycle is a decision made among R&D leaders, and you are one of them. You bring the picture of technical and security risk that shapes what the group decides, and you're in the room when it's decided. You report to the VP of Engineering, who is an active partner and will engage where it counts, but you're expected to move things forward on your own.

What You'll Do

Drive cross-cutting bets

• Identify the problems that span squads, including platform modernization, authentication, dependency health, and security, and decide which are worth taking on

• Shape that work with Staff Engineers: define the problem, set boundaries on scope and time, and work through the technical risks before a team commits to it

• Bring shaped work to the group of R&D leaders, including you, who decide what teams take on each cycle, with a clear case for why it matters now

• Support the teams building cross-cutting work so they can make good technical decisions on their own

Lead the Staff Engineers

• Grow the Staff Engineer group through hiring and development, expanding the group’s capacity to drive impact across the business

• Set direction for the team and decide where each Staff Engineer's time goes, rebalancing as priorities shift

• Coach Staff Engineers as technical leaders: framing ambiguous problems, building agreement across squads, and writing decisions down

• Judge technical tradeoffs on cross-cutting…