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 an experienced Director, Professional Services to lead the global Data Migration & Conversion and AI & Automation capabilities within Professional Services. This role owns the strategy, operating model, people, delivery readiness, methodology, tooling, customer outcomes, and operational performance of these practices. The Director will turn proven delivery experience, regional innovation, and emerging technologies into consistent, scalable services that improve implementation speed, quality, predictability, and customer value. The successful candidate will be equally comfortable setting a multi-year capability roadmap, leading managers and technical teams, guiding complex customer programs, and translating operations into measurable financial and delivery outcomes. This leader will partner across Professional Services, Product, Engineering, Cloud, Support, Security, Sales, Finance, Enablement, and regional teams to create a globally aligned model while preserving the strongest lessons and assets developed close to customers. Where You Will Make an Impact Practice Strategy and Portfolio Leadership
- Own and communicate the global strategy, roadmap, priorities, and operating model for Data Migration & Conversion and AI & Automation within Professional Services.
- Define a coherent portfolio of services, accelerators, reference architectures, reusable components, templates, runbooks, and implementation guidance that can be applied consistently across regions and customer engagement models.
- Translate proven regional practices and customer delivery lessons into a scalable global methodology and tooling strategy; ensure valuable local capabilities are preserved, assessed, and incorporated into the official model where appropriate.
- Establish clear intake, prioritization, investment, build-versus-buy, and lifecycle decisions for migration tooling, AI use cases, software automation, RPA, intelligent document processing, and related platforms.
- Represent the practices in annual planning, executive reviews, strategic partnerships, and major cross-functional initiatives.
Data Migration and Conversion Leadership
- Lead the teams responsible for migration discovery, source-data assessment, extraction, mapping, transformation, loading, validation, reconciliation, testing, dress rehearsals, cutover support, and post-load verification.
- Set global standards for repeatable, controlled, and auditable migration delivery, including quality gates, data validation, test-data management, security, privacy, and customer readiness.
- Advance the next generation of data-conversion tooling through standardized extract templates, reusable mappings, code repositories, knowledge bases, automation, and AI-assisted mapping and transformation workflows.
- Create mechanisms to capture gold-standard conversion assets and subject-matter expertise, treat mappings and migration logic as managed intellectual property, and continuously improve them through delivery feedback.
- Measure and improve time, cost, throughput, quality, and predictability by migration domain and customer; reduce avoidable defects and post-go-live escalations.
AI, Software Automation, and RPA Leadership
- Lead customer-facing and internal automation capabilities spanning AI-assisted process optimization, software development, UiPath-based RPA, ServiceNow automation, intelligent document processing, APIs, and agentic or knowledge-based solutions.
- Own the automation opportunity pipeline from process discovery and feasibility assessment through architecture, development, testing, deployment, adoption, support, and value realization.
- Ensure solutions are secure, maintainable, well documented, reusable, and aligned with responsible-AI, data-governance, compliance, and enterprise architecture expectations.
- Establish Agile delivery practices and portfolio visibility through Jira or equivalent tools, including a consolidated backlog, transparent priorities, delivery metrics, and clear accountability.
- Scale an AI & Automation Center of Excellence that increases throughput, reduces dependence on scarce senior subject-matter experts, and develops sustainable global and nearshore talent.
People Care and Organizational Capability
- Lead, coach, and develop managers, technical leads, consultants, developers, and migration practitioners; create clarity of purpose, accountability, and collaboration across a distributed global team.
- Define organization design, role expectations, competency models, career paths, succession plans, certification priorities, and targeted enablement for data, AI, automation, software, and RPA disciplines.
- Build a culture that moves with urgency, learns openly, shares knowledge, and builds to scale while maintaining strong engineering and consulting discipline.
- Own workforce and capacity planning, hiring, onboarding, performance management, team health, contractor and partner strategy, and skill deployment against demand.
- Create an environment in which early-career talent can contribute quickly while senior staff focus on architecture, governance, complex problem solving, and customer leadership.
Delivery Excellence, Operations, and Financial Performance
- Connect practice operations to financial outcomes, including demand forecasting, capacity, utilization, revenue, margin, labor mix, investment, and measurable efficiency gains.
- Establish and review a balanced scorecard covering delivery quality, cycle time, backlog throughput, utilization, revenue, customer satisfaction, reuse, automation savings, adoption, and team capability.
- Provide governance and executive oversight for strategic or high-risk engagements; resolve escalations, remove systemic blockers, and ensure durable corrective actions.
- Drive delivery readiness by keeping methods, tools, environments, documentation, and enablement aligned to product and SaaS release cycles.
- Support Sales and account teams with service strategy, scoping, estimates, proposals, pricing inputs, demonstrations, and executive customer conversations for complex opportunities.
Customer and Cross-Functional Leadership
- Serve as a trusted advisor and senior escalation point for customers undertaking complex migrations, conversions, automation programs, or AI-enabled transformation.
- Build strong working relationships with regional Professional Services teams and functional subject-matter experts to align global standards with customer and market realities.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Cloud, Support, Security, Legal, Finance, Enablement, and Sales to address platform gaps, prioritize investments, and ensure solutions can be supported at scale.
- Develop customer evidence, case studies, metrics, and reusable lessons that strengthen adoption, pre-sales credibility, and continuous improvement across the practice.
What You Will Bring
- 10+ years of progressive experience in professional services, consulting, enterprise software delivery, data services, engineering, or a closely related field, including significant people-leadership responsibility.
- Demonstrated success leading global or distributed teams and building multidisciplinary capabilities across managers, technical leads, consultants, developers, and delivery practitioners.
- Deep knowledge of complex enterprise data migration and conversion, including source-data discovery, ETL/ELT, mapping, transformation, validation, reconciliation, testing, cutover, and data-quality management.
- Experience leading AI, software automation, or RPA portfolios, with practical knowledge of platforms such as UiPath or comparable tools and familiarity with APIs, SQL, scripting, intelligent document processing, and AI/ML-enabled workflows.
- Proven ability to productize consulting capabilities through standardized methods, reusable assets, accelerators, reference architectures, runbooks, and enablement.
- Strong operational and financial acumen, including utilization, revenue, margin, demand and capacity planning, labor strategy, business cases, and benefits realization.
- Experience with Agile delivery and portfolio-management practices, including backlog prioritization, Jira or equivalent work-management platforms, and outcome-based metrics.
- Demonstrated expertise in design thinking and product management, with the ability to apply human-centered design principles, identify customer needs, prioritize requirements, and translate innovative ideas into actionable product strategies and solutions.
- Executive-level communication, stakeholder management, and customer-facing consulting skills; ability to simplify complex technical and operational topics and influence across organizational boundaries.
- Sound judgment regarding data privacy, security, responsible AI, intellectual property, compliance, and risk in customer and internal delivery environments.
Not Required, but Preferred
- Experience in higher education technology, student information systems, ERP implementations, or Ellucian Banner and Colleague environments.
- Experience with cloud-native and agentic AI architectures, including AWS or Azure services, knowledge bases, vector search, orchestration, and secure model integration.
- UiPath certification or equivalent automation-platform credentials.
- Experience building and scaling a Center of Excellence, global delivery model, or nearshore capability.
- Prior accountability for a consulting practice budget, P&L, or portfolio-level financial plan.
- Background in process reengineering, Lean, Six Sigma, or another structured continuous-improvement discipline.
How Success Will Be Measured
- Consistent, high-quality delivery with improved predictability, customer satisfaction, and fewer avoidable post-go-live issues.
- Reduced migration and automation cycle times, lower delivery effort, stronger validation, and increased throughput.
- Achievement of revenue, margin, utilization, capacity, and cost-efficiency objectives for the practices.
- Adoption and reuse of global methods, tooling, templates, mappings, components, and other intellectual property across regions and engagements.
- A transparent, prioritized portfolio with measurable value realization from AI and automation investments.
- A healthy, engaged, and increasingly capable team with strong retention, succession, certification, and internal mobility.
- Effective governance of data, AI, security, supportability, and operational risk.
- This job description summarizes the principal responsibilities of the role and is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Responsibilities may evolve as business needs, technologies, and the Professional Services operating model change.
What makes #Ellucianlife
- 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