Director Software Engineering
Ellevation
Director Software Engineering
Ellevation
English Learner data management and planning
Salary Range: 200000 to 250000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)
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.
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.
English Learner data management and planning
Ellevation Education provides a centralized digital platform for K-12 school districts to manage English Learner (EL) data, analyze student performance, plan instruction, and ensure compliance. It combines data from multiple sources into one system, helping educators differentiate instruction and reduce administrative tasks, with features like dashboards, reporting, and professional development. The platform includes 80+ classroom activities created by language acquisition experts to support EL instruction across subjects and grades. The company operates on a subscription model, selling to districts that need to manage EL programs and generate stakeholder reports. Its goal is to help educators improve EL outcomes and streamline program management by delivering data-driven instructional planning and compliance capabilities.
Explore more opportunities at Ellevation