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?
- 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 1,200 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
Remote Workspace
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!
