Senior Architect (Data, Cloud, AI)

About Ellucian

Ellucian powers innovation for higher education, partnering with approximately 3,000 customers across 50 countries, serving more than 21 million students. Ellucian's AI-powered platform, trained on the richest dataset available in higher education, drives efficiency, personalized experiences, and strengthened engagement for all students, faculty and staff. Fueled by decades of experience with a singular focus on the unique needs of learning institutions, the Ellucian platform features best-in-class SaaS capabilities and delivers insights needed now and into the future. These solutions and services span the entire student lifecycle, including data-rich tools for student recruitment, enrollment, and retention to workforce analytics, fundraising, and alumni engagement. Ellucian's innovative solutions, vast ecosystem of partners and user community of more than 45,000 provides best practices leading to greater institutional success and achieving better student outcomes.

About The Opportunity

Ellucian is seeking a highly skilled and innovative Senior Architect to lead the architecture and technical strategy for our next-generation SaaS Data Platform. This role will drive the transformation of our current data warehouse ecosystem into a modern, scalable, cloud-native Lakehouse platform capable of supporting analytics, AI/ML workloads, agentic AI capabilities, and real-time data products.

As a hands-on technical leader, you will bring deep expertise in data platforms, distributed systems, cloud technologies, and emerging AI capabilities. You will spearhead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and partner closely across product, engineering, and cross-functional teams to design and deliver advanced solutions that enhance student success and drive higher education transformation.

Where You Will Make an Impact

• Architecture & Strategy: Define and drive the target-state architecture and technology roadmap for a modern, scalable multi-tenant SaaS Data Platform aligned to business and product priorities. Establish architectural standards, reference architectures, and technology principles that support analytics, AI-native products, agentic systems, and long-term platform evolution across the organization.
• Platform Modernization: Lead the transition from traditional data warehouse architectures to a cloud-native Lakehouse platform supporting structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• Data Architecture & Governance: Define enterprise data architecture standards, including data modeling approaches, metadata management, lineage, semantic layers, data product design, and governance frameworks to ensure consistency, discoverability, quality, and reuse across the platform.
• AI-Enabled Data Platform: Design and enable systems that support AI/ML workloads, including generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic AI workflows, vector search, and real-time inference architectures. Establish reusable platform patterns for responsible AI adoption, model observability, governance, security, and operational scalability.Technical Leadership: Serve as a senior technical authority, leading architecture reviews, guiding critical design decisions, and mentoring engineers to elevate technical standards across teams.
• Scalability & Reliability: Architect high-performance, resilient, and cost-efficient systems, establishing standards for observability, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Engineering Excellence & Collaboration: Drive best practices across CI/CD, testing, and DevOps, and partner across product, engineering, and cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, customer-centric solutions.
  
  

What You Will Bring

• Experience: 15+ years of software engineering experience with a strong background building modern data platforms in SaaS environments.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Data Platform Expertise: Deep knowledge of modern data architectures, including Lakehouse, Data Mesh, or large-scale data platforms, and the ability to evolve legacy environments.
• Distributed Systems: Proven experience designing and building scalable, highly available distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Modern Data Stack: Hands-on experience with technologies such as Apache Spark, Kafka, Trino, Flink, Iceberg, or Delta Lake.
• Cloud Engineering: Strong expertise in cloud platforms (e.g., AWS), containerization, and designing scalable, cost-efficient infrastructure.
• AI & LLM Systems: Experience designing and enabling AI-powered platforms and products, including LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector data architectures and production AI/ML workloads in enterprise environments. Ability to evaluate AI technologies and make informed decisions regarding performance, cost, reliability, security, and governance.
• Engineering Practices: Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, observability, and modern DevOps practices to support reliable, high-quality delivery.
• Security & Governance: Strong understanding of secure system design, data governance, and enterprise risk considerations, including handling sensitive data.
• Leadership & Communication: Proven ability to influence architectural direction, mentor engineers, communicate complex technical concepts clearly, and align stakeholders across teams to drive execution.
  
  

What makes #Ellucianlife

• 12 days vacation, 10 days causal leaves plus 11 public holidays
• Competitive gratuity policy
• Group insurance and Annual health checkup plan with a variety of family and wellness benefits.
• Thrive Flex Lifestyle Account (LSA) that allows you to contribute towards your health, financial or learning interests
• 5 charitable days to support the community that supports us
• Wellness
• Headspace (mental health)
• Wellbeats (virtual fitness classes)
• RethinkCare – caregiver support
• Diversity and inclusion programs that promote employee resource groups such as: Buzzinga and Lean In Team to name a few.
• Parental leave
• Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team
• We Foster a learning culture with:
• Education Assistance Program
• Professional development opportunities
• LinkedIn Learning