Senior Solutions Architect (Enterprise Higher Education Implementation Experience)

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.

Ellucian’s Professional Services team is looking for a Senior Solutions Architect to serve as the architectural delivery lead for our most complex higher education implementations—typically system-wide programs spanning multiple institutions, campuses, or schools. In this role, you will own the end-to-end solution architecture across a broad Ellucian portfolio, guiding strategy through execution to ensure solutions are scalable, supportable, and aligned to measurable institutional outcomes.

This position is delivery-first and requires deep experience leading large, cross-functional programs. You may lead a team of Solutions Architects on major engagements (matrix leadership) and act as the primary architectural escalation point for program leadership, project teams, and executive stakeholders. While the role may support select presales activities, the primary focus is driving delivery excellence and client success.

In addition, the Senior Solutions Architect is expected to provide thought leadership by contributing to global standards, practices, and reusable IP that improve delivery consistency, accelerate time-to-value, increase client satisfaction, and elevate the overall client experience.

Where you will make an impact

System-Wide Delivery Leadership

• Serve as the lead architect for large-scale, system-wide implementations spanning multiple schools/campuses and complex stakeholder environments.
• Translate institutional goals into an executable architecture approach that balances outcomes, risk, cost, timeline, and long-term operability.
• Establish architectural guardrails and decision frameworks; drive alignment across functional, technical, data, integration, reporting, and security workstreams.
• Act as the architectural escalation point for complex delivery challenges and competing priorities.

Architecture Strategy & Solution Delivery

• Design and guide delivery of scalable end-to-end solutions across Ellucian products and platforms, maximizing configuration, extensibility, and SaaS best practices.
• Ensure solution architecture aligns with customer goals, Ellucian product direction, and delivery standards—while remaining realistic and implementable.
• Lead/guide architecture artifacts and reviews (e.g., solution architecture, integration architecture, environment approach, data and reporting strategy).
• Drive consistent adoption of delivery methodologies (Agile), tooling, and governance practices that improve predictability and quality.

Engagement Oversight & Execution

• Partner with Project Managers, delivery leaders, Product Owners, and Enterprise Architects to align plan, dependencies, resourcing, and execution approach.
• Lead discovery and architecture design activities (including workshops), ensuring requirements, process alignment, and solution fit are fully understood.
• Identify and mitigate delivery risks early (scope, complexity, integration, data readiness, change impacts), and support strong governance and decision-making.
• Ensure solutions are implemented as designed, with appropriate traceability, quality controls, and readiness for go-live and sustained support.

Team Leadership & Enablement (Matrix)

• Lead and coordinate a team of Solutions Architects on large programs, setting architectural direction, reviewing work products, and ensuring consistency.
• Mentor and coach architects and cross-functional team members on standards, patterns, and delivery practices to raise overall capability and quality.
• Promote a culture of collaboration, clarity, and accountability across distributed teams and stakeholders.

Presales & Solutioning Support (As Needed)

• Provide strategic solutioning support during presales, including discovery, scoping, estimating, and solution approach input for proposals and statements of work.
• Help articulate value, trade-offs, and ROI to executive stakeholders, grounding recommendations in institutional outcomes and delivery reality.

Standards, Methodology & Reusable IP (Thought Leadership)

• Contribute to and help evolve Ellucian’s global architecture repository through reference architectures, patterns, templates, playbooks, and governance frameworks.
• Identify repeatable delivery improvements and create reusable assets that accelerate execution, reduce risk, and improve client experience.
• Share lessons learned and best practices through communities of practice, enablement content, and coaching—scaling impact beyond individual projects.

What will you bring

• 10+ years of solution architecture and delivery experience in consulting or professional services, including leadership on large, complex programs.
• Demonstrated success leading enterprise higher education implementations
• Deep expertise across higher education enterprise domains (preferably Ellucian), such as Student Information Systems (SIS), Finance, HR, and adjacent ecosystems.
• Strong technical and functional fluency in SaaS architectures, ERP ecosystems, integrations, data migration, reporting/analytics, and security considerations.
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and drive alignment across stakeholders with competing priorities—while maintaining delivery momentum.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to convey complex concepts to technical teams and executive audiences with clarity and confidence.
• Strong customer presence; skilled at building trust, facilitating workshops, driving decisions, and navigating ambiguity in high-visibility programs.
• A practical, outcomes-oriented approach to architecture—balancing “what’s ideal” with “what will work” to deliver measurable results.

Nice to have

• System-wide implementations of ERP and SIS.

• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision  
• Flexible time off  
• Thrive Flex Lifestyle Account (LSA) that allows you to contribute towards your health, financial or learning interests
• 401k w/ match & BrightPlan - to help you save for the future
• Parental Leave
• 5 charitable days to support the community that supports us
• Telemedicine
• Wellness
  • Headspace Care (mental health)
  • Wellbeats (virtual fitness classes)
• RethinkCare & Wellthy– caregiver support
• Diversity and inclusion programs which provide access to internal employee resource groups  
• 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

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