Job Description
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 2000 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?
- Working on meaningful challenges that directly impact English Learners.
- Helping define and build the future of internal platforms and developer experience at a mission-driven company.
- Collaborating in a supportive cross-functional environment.
- Growing personally and professionally as part of a high-performing team.
- Exploring how AI can responsibly accelerate how engineers build test and operate systems.
- Playing a leadership role in modernizing the foundations that power Ellevation’s platform.
At Ellevation we believe in the power of education and the educators who make it possible. Joining our team means:
Top Skills
What the Team is Saying
What We Do
Ellevation is a mission-driven company dedicated to helping English Learners (ELs) achieve their highest aspirations. We are an indispensable partner to school district administrators teachers and students across the United States who use our products to manage complex program requirements build the capacity of teachers to serve multilingual learners and empower students with the academic language necessary for success in school. Ellevation is the only EL program management solution that goes beyond compliance and impacts instruction in every classroom. We currently serve more than 1200 partner districts and support 2 million students in nearly every state.
Why Work With Us
We are a mission-driven team of entrepreneurial and passionate people who love to learn innovate and solve complex challenges. At Ellevation we provide opportunities for professional development clear career paths within the company and we promote within. Join our team and feel good about the immense impact your work has on Education!
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Ellevation Education Offices
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Employees work remotely.
Our headquarters are located in Boston MA but about a third of our team lives and works remotely in other states. We are a remote-first company!
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Date Posted
04/02/2026
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