Senior Corporate Counsel, Commercial | Hybrid | Reston, VA

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 business-minded, collaborative, and self-motivated Senior Corporate Counsel to provide legal support across a broad range of commercial contracts and related matters. In this role, you will review, draft, and negotiate complex customer and commercial agreements and serve as a trusted legal partner to Ellucian business teams. You will work closely with Sales, Product, Information Security, Engineering, Finance, Operations, and other stakeholders to provide practical legal guidance, help navigate contractual and regulatory issues, and support the successful completion of commercial transactions. You will also contribute to improvements in contracting processes, legal operations, and the use of technology to make the delivery of legal services more efficient and scalable. If you are a practical, solutions-oriented attorney who understands technology, enjoys partnering across the business, and knows how to balance legal risk with business objectives to get deals done, this could be a great fit. Where You Will Make An Impact Draft, structure, review, negotiate, and manage a broad range of complex commercial agreements, including SaaS subscription and cloud services agreements, SOWs, license agreements Data Privacy/Processing addenda (DPAs), AI addenda, non-disclosure agreements, and vendor/supplier agreements. Lead end-to-end negotiations for high-value, strategic transactions, balancing legal risk with business objectives to close impactful deals. Advise on corporate, intellectual property, governance, and compliance matters. Provide guidance on complex regulatory issues affecting global SaaS providers, including data privacy, AI governance, and information security. Support compliance with GDPR, CCPA, EU AI Act, FERPA, state privacy and other applicable statutes and regulations. Continuously improve contracting and legal operations functions, including updating contract templates, playbooks, policies and other materials to ensure regional/global consistency. Use AI tooling to innovate with respect to legal operations, contract governance, and operating procedures and policies. Collaborate with the team on the design and configuration of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) workflows, including contract intake, template generation, review and negotiation, approval routing, signature, contract storage and post-execution processes. Develop and maintain a strong knowledge of the product and services portfolio.  Uphold the company’s ethical standards and demonstrate sound professional judgment in all legal and business matters. Leverage CLM data, reporting and analytics to measure contract cycle times, identify bottlenecks, monitor adoption and compliance, and recommend process improvements. Identify opportunities to expand the use of CLM and related legal technology, including automation and AI-enabled capabilities, to improve efficiency, consistency, visibility and the delivery of legal services. What You Will