Over the last 10+ years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the administrators, teachers, and specialists who support English Learners at public schools across the U.S. Today, nearly 2,000 school districts use our software to manage their EL programs. We are a successful, rapidly growing business with a real mission: helping English Learners achieve their highest aspirations.
We’re making major investments in how our platform supports the communication, data, and workflow needs of educators — and we’re beginning to explore how AI can accelerate, enhance, and reimagine these experiences. As we scale, we’re looking for engineering leaders who want to do more than manage systems — people who want to help shape the internal platforms and paved paths that enable our teams to build, ship, and operate high-quality software.
About the Role
As a Senior Engineering Manager for CloudOps, you’ll lead the team responsible for the internal platforms, tools, and paved paths that power engineering at Ellevation. Your team’s mission is to build the golden paths that make it easy — and fast — for product teams to build, deploy, observe, and operate services reliably on AWS.
You’ll be accountable for evolving our cloud foundations, developer tooling, CI/CD pipelines, observability defaults, and internal developer experience. You’ll help transform a landscape that includes legacy systems and “pets-style” infrastructure into a modern, scalable, well-supported platform that enables safe velocity across engineering.
In the near term, you’ll also shepherd improvements to our Cloud Development Environment (CDE) — the Windows-based workflow required for legacy .NET Framework development — while leading the organization toward long-term modernization and eventual retirement of those systems.
Above all, this role is about shaping culture: moving CloudOps from a reactive, security-centric posture to a platform mindset grounded in enablement, thoughtful tradeoffs, and “making the right way the easy way.” You’ll help the team grow its confidence, challenge assumptions, and build for the future.
About You
- Think beyond infrastructure. You approach platform work with a product mindset, focusing on developer experience, reliability, and ease of adoption.
- Believe in paved paths. You want to create delightful, opinionated workflows that reduce cognitive load and empower teams to move quickly and safely.
- Are energized by modernization. Whether it’s legacy infrastructure, brittle workflows, or old deployment patterns, you’re excited to bring clarity, challenge status quo decisions, and lead change.
- Balance tradeoffs well. Security, reliability, cost, and velocity all matter — and you know how to weigh them in context, not as absolutes.
- Lead with clarity and heart. You communicate well, mentor effectively, build trust, and help teams navigate ambiguity and cultural shifts.
- Bring technical depth. You understand cloud-native architecture, AWS, IaC, CI/CD, observability, and modern DevEx practices, even if you’re not hands-on every day.
- Embrace our mission. You believe deeply in helping educators and students succeed, and you’re excited to build the platforms that help us reach them.
What You’ll Do
- Lead and grow the CloudOps (Platform & DevEx) team, providing clarity, coaching, mentorship, and a strong sense of purpose.
- Build and evolve paved paths for service creation, deployment, observability, and operations — defining “the Ellevation way” to build software.
- Improve developer experience across the stack: container workflows, repo templates, CI/CD automation, observability defaults, and internal tooling.
- Stabilize and enhance the Cloud Development Environment (CDE) for .NET Framework development while guiding the organization toward long-term modernization and retirement of legacy systems.
- Drive modernization of legacy infrastructure and help the team shift from “pets vs. cattle” to scalable, reliable, well-automated patterns.
- Partner with product engineering teams to understand friction, remove obstacles, and co-create better workflows and tools.
- Define and measure DevEx outcomes using frameworks like SPACE, focusing on satisfaction, flow, clarity, and feedback loops.
- Collaborate with Security on guardrails and secure defaults while ensuring CloudOps remains an enablement-focused team, not a gatekeeper.
- Promote platform thinking and cultural change — helping the team build confidence, question assumptions, and engage proactively with partners across engineering.
- Manage vendor relationships, infrastructure costs, and resourcing for the platform surface areas you own.
What You’ll Bring
- 8+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years leading platform, cloud infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps teams.
- Strong experience with AWS (compute, networking, IAM, storage, databases) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK).
- Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines and secure deployment workflows (GitHub Actions, OIDC, artifact management).
- Familiarity with modern observability practices (metrics, logs, traces; OpenTelemetry; CloudWatch, Datadog, or Grafana).
- Practical knowledge of containerized applications (Docker, ECS/EKS) and developer workflows on Mac/Linux.
- Hands-on understanding of balancing security, reliability, and developer experience through guardrails and risk-based tradeoffs.
- Experience modernizing legacy systems or shepherding large technical transitions is a strong plus.
- A track record of building strong teams, mentoring engineers, and leading through ambiguity and change.
- Curiosity and excitement about how AI can enhance developer workflows, observability, and tooling — even if you’re still learning.
Why Ellevation?
Are you passionate about growth and eager to learn? Do you possess a drive to excel and make a difference? Ellevation values diversity, creativity, and a hunger for new perspectives. While our job postings outline preferred qualifications, we believe that talent comes in various forms. If you're motivated, adaptable, and ready to contribute, we encourage you to apply. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences, recognizing that unique skills and fresh outlooks are invaluable assets to our team. Don't let a checklist of requirements deter you – take the leap, and let's explore the possibilities together!
About Us:
At Ellevation, we develop world-class software to help educators serve the fastest growing population of K-12 students: English Learners (ELs). Ellevation helps school districts transform their Multilingual Learner programs and ensure all students can achieve their highest aspirations. Our product suite includes a best-in-class data and instructional planning platform, resources to build teacher capacity, and student-facing programs to teach academic language.
We are a fast-growing, mission-driven technology company partnering with over 2,000 school districts and more than 2 million current and former English Learners. Over the next five years, we plan to double the number of ELs we serve and drive measurable outcomes for students. Ellevation merged with Curriculum Associates in 2021 to accelerate impact for Multilingual Learners. Our company continues to operate independently and is well-capitalized to support our ambitious social and financial objectives.
Why Ellevation?
In addition to our great benefits and competitive salaries, here are some things that make us unique:
+ Mission-driven organization where team members are empowered to make a significant impact
+ Opportunities to join Employee Resource Groups and support building a culture of belonging
+ Professional development and growth opportunities
+ Company and team offsites in various cities across the United States
+ Collaborative workspace in the heart of Boston - a stone's throw from many central T stops (Downtown Crossing, Government Center, and Aquarium). Free snacks, beverages, and local organic fruit provided
+ Remote and in-person engagement opportunities, including happy hours, themed events, and competitions
+ Remote and in-person wellness programming to support team’s mental and physical wellbeing
Here at Ellevation, we champion diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. We strive to build a team that reflects the diverse communities we serve. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values a range of ideas and opinions.
We believe in building a culture where productivity can flourish, one that is empathetic, respectful, and inclusive. We are proud to have been recognized in prior years as “Best Tech Workplace for Diversity” by the Timmy Awards for investing in training around inclusive behaviors, microaggressions, unconscious bias, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and feedback across the company. We are encouraged by our progress, but there’s more work to be done.
Benefits – Benefits eligible employees (and qualifying dependents) are covered by medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurance. Employees can enroll in our company's 401(k) retirement plan and receive an employer match up to 50% on the first 7% of your contribution, with pre-tax and Roth options. Employees have access to flexible paid time off for vacations, sick and disability policy, additional 10 paid company holidays, 2 floating holidays and a winter office closure between Christmas and New Year's. In addition, we provide a generous parental leave benefit, back-up childcare or eldercare, and a variety of other perks to support the health and well-being of our employees.
Additional Information: Ellevation operates under Curriculum Associates, LLC, an Equal Opportunity Employer. Curriculum Associates, LLC will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, genetic information, or any other category protected by law. Curriculum Associates, LLC will grant employment, without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, genetic information, or any other category protected by law. Such action shall include, but not be limited to, the following: employment, upgrading, demotion, transfer, recruitment or recruitment advertising, layoff or termination, rates of pay or other forms of compensation.
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