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 ownLead 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 work, and stand behind your team's decisionsLead security practice at Ellevation

• Turn the standards agreed with CA into working practice at Ellevation, with clear ownership and escalation inside engineering
• Get findings into the tools and workflows engineers already use, in a form they can act on without interpretation
• Build security thinking, such as threat modeling, into how work is shaped
• Coordinate the full security surface with CA's teams, including incident response, vendor and third-party risk, security awareness, district security questionnaires, and pen test cycles
• Hold accountability for Ellevation's compliance evidence, coordinating contributions across engineering and productOwn the CA security relationship

• Own Ellevation's relationship with CA's central security organization, and learn how security decisions get made there
• Work with CA on the standards, SLAs, and KPIs Ellevation is measured against: understand how they're set and calculated, help shape how they apply to Ellevation, and push for changes where they don't fit how we build
• Partner with CA on how its central scanning is scoped and configured for Ellevation's repositories and stack
• Reconcile Ellevation's reporting with CA's so nobody is surprised by a number
• Report weekly to CA stakeholders on remediation progress, blockers, and security KPIs
• Represent Ellevation in CA security forums, and bring back what's relevant in a form Ellevation can act on

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years in software engineering, including experience leading engineering teams
• Experience hiring and leading senior and staff-level engineers, and growing them as technical leaders
• A track record of taking large, ambiguous technical problems that span teams, such as platform modernization, legacy migrations, or authentication, from a well-defined problem through delivery, working through teams that did not report to you
• A strong technical foundation in modern web applications, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD, enough to judge tradeoffs and earn credibility with Staff Engineers
• A background in security across application security, cloud security, compliance, and incident response, including hands-on experience with SAST, SCA, and dependency scanning tooling
• Experience moving decisions forward in a matrixed organization, ideally between a central function and a business unit at a parent company, acquirer, or major partner
• A track record of communicating technical and security risk to executive audiences
• Experience building software that handles sensitive or regulated data, such as in education, healthcare, or financial services, is a strong plus