Director, Software Engineering
Senior engineering leadership role at Ellevation Education: leads a team of Staff Engineers driving cross-cutting work (platform modernization, authentication, dependency health) across eight product squads, and owns the security practice plus the security relationship with parent company Curriculum Associates. Grounded in web apps, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and application security.
- Compensation
- $200K–$250K / yr
- Location
- Boston, MA or Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 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
- Track record taking large, ambiguous cross-team technical problems (platform modernization, legacy migrations, authentication) from definition through delivery via teams that didn't report to you
- Strong technical foundation in modern web applications, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD
- Security background spanning application security, cloud security, compliance, and incident response, including hands-on 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
- Track record communicating technical and security risk to executive audiences
Nice to have
- Experience building software that handles sensitive or regulated data (education, healthcare, or financial services)
Full description
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.