Senior Architect (Data, Cloud, AI)

Together we are powering the future of Higher Education 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…