Edtech.com's Summary

Ellevation Education is hiring a Director, Software Engineering. The role leads a team of Staff Engineers who drive engineering work that cuts across Ellevation's eight product squads, including platform modernization, authentication, dependency health, and security, and it owns Ellevation's security practice and its relationship with the central security organization at parent company Curriculum Associates. The director reports to the VP of Engineering and sits among the R&D leaders who decide what teams take on each cycle.

Highlights

Identify the problems that span Ellevation's squads, such as platform modernization, authentication, and dependency health, and shape each one with Staff Engineers by defining the problem, setting scope and time boundaries, and working through technical risks before a team commits.
Lead and grow the Staff Engineer group through hiring and coaching, deciding where each engineer's time goes and rebalancing as priorities shift.
Make the case to the group of R&D leaders for which cross-cutting work teams should take on each cycle, weighing what to fix now, what can wait, and what is not worth doing.
Turn the security standards agreed with Curriculum Associates into working practice inside engineering, getting scan findings into the tools engineers already use and building threat modeling into how work is shaped.
Coordinate the wider security surface with Curriculum Associates' teams, including incident response, vendor and third-party risk, district security questionnaires, pen test cycles, and compliance evidence.
Own the relationship with Curriculum Associates' central security organization, working on the standards, SLAs, and KPIs Ellevation is measured against, configuring central scanning for Ellevation's repositories, and reporting weekly on remediation progress and blockers.
Bring 10+ years in software engineering, including leading engineering teams and hiring and developing senior and staff-level engineers.
Show a track record of carrying large, ambiguous cross-team problems such as legacy migrations or authentication from definition through delivery, without direct authority over the teams involved.
Bring security experience across application security, cloud security, compliance, and incident response, with hands-on use of SAST, SCA, and dependency scanning tooling, plus the ability to explain technical and security risk to executives.
Experience building software that handles sensitive or regulated data, such as in education, healthcare, or financial services, is a strong plus.
Pay of $200,000 to $250,000 per year, with the role based in Boston, MA or remote.

Director, Software Engineering 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.

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 work, and stand behind your team's decisions

Lead 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 product

Own 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

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