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 Data Platform and analytics solution. This role will be instrumental in transforming our current data warehouse ecosystem into a modern, scalable, cloud-native Lakehouse platform capable of supporting analytics, AI/ML workloads, agentic AI experiences, and real-time data products. This is a hands-on architecture leadership role requiring deep expertise in data platforms, data warehouse, distributed systems, cloud technologies, and emerging AI technologies. As a key technical leader , role offers opportunities to spearhead technical initiatives, mentor engineers at all levels, and work closely with internal product managers, experienced engineers, and cross-functional teams to design, develop, test, and deliver advanced features that enhance student success and drive higher education transformation. Where You Will Make an Impact Architecture & Strategy Build and own the target-state architecture for a next-generation Lakehouse platform. Develop technology roadmaps aligned with business strategy and product vision. Lead architectural decisions across data ingestion, storage, processing, governance, observability, security, and AI enablement. Establish architecture principles, standards, and reference architectures. Platform Modernization Lead migration from traditional data warehouse architectures to modern Lakehouse architectures. Design scalable data platforms supporting structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Evaluate and drive adoption of technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Spark, DuckDB, Trino, Flink, Kafka, and cloud-native analytics services. Design multi-tenant SaaS architectures with strong security and data isolation. AI & Intelligent Data Platform Define architecture patterns enabling AI-powered data experiences. Design platforms supporting: Generative AI applications Agentic AI workflows Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Vector databases and semantic search AI-assisted analytics and insights Partner with AI teams to operationalize ML and GenAI workloads. Evaluate emerging AI technologies and determine applicability to the platform roadmap. Technical Leadership Take ownership of critical tasks from specification review through final testing and deployment, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery. Serve as the highest level technical authority for the platform. Mentor architects and senior engineers. Conduct architecture reviews and guide critical design decisions. Drive engineering excellence and technical innovation across teams. Scalability, Reliability & Operations Architect for high availability, performance, resiliency, and cost optimization. Define observability and operational excellence standards. Drive platform reliability through automation and SRE practices. Establish governance around performance, security, compliance, and data