Senior Manager, Professional Services

Description

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 is seeking an experienced Senior Manager, Professional Services to lead our regional Solution Architecture team across EMEA and Eastern North America, while playing a key role in shaping how we deliver successful SaaS transformations for higher education institutions.

This leadership role brings together people management, solution architecture, consulting operations, and delivery excellence. You will ensure our Solution Architects are equipped, effectively deployed, and delivering high-quality customer outcomes, while connecting regional delivery needs with Ellucian's global methodology, tooling, and implementation practices.

The ideal candidate combines strong enterprise SaaS delivery experience with the ability to lead distributed teams, influence global stakeholders, and turn practical delivery insights into scalable improvements.

Where You Will Make an Impact

Lead and Develop Regional Solution Architecture

• Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of Solution Architects across EMEA and Eastern North America, building technical capability, consulting excellence, and strong customer engagement.

• Own regional workforce planning, resource allocation, utilization, hiring, performance management, and succession planning, ensuring skills and capacity align with customer demand.

• Establish consistent architecture standards, governance, and development practices across discovery, solution design, SaaS readiness, implementation, and adoption.

• Provide senior leadership and escalation support for complex engagements, ensuring architecture decisions, dependencies, and delivery risks are effectively managed.

Shape Methodology, Tooling, and Delivery Excellence

• Serve as the key regional interface between EMEA Professional Services leadership and the global Methodology & Tooling organization, ensuring regional priorities influence global delivery improvements.

• Drive consistent adoption of Ellucian's delivery methodologies, including CARM, Navigate to SaaS, prescriptive implementation models, reusable assets, and supporting tools.

• Translate customer feedback, delivery challenges, and lessons learned into practical improvements to methodology, tooling, training, and implementation efficiency.

• Partner with Product, Cloud, Enablement, Project Management, Sales, and regional delivery leaders to strengthen implementation readiness, standardization, and scalability.

• Champion appropriate automation and AI-enabled delivery improvements that reduce manual effort, strengthen quality, and improve customer outcomes.

Drive Customer Success and Delivery Governance

• Provide leadership oversight across the regional Solution Architecture portfolio, ensuring delivery quality, predictability, risk management, and customer satisfaction.

• Act as a trusted advisor and senior escalation point for complex architecture, implementation, scope, and delivery challenges.

• Support solution scoping, estimation, proposals, statements of work, and delivery-readiness reviews to ensure achievable commitments and effective governance.

• Coordinate critical dependencies across architecture, integrations, data migration, and implementation teams to support successful SaaS transformations.

• Communicate delivery progress, risks, and strategic decisions clearly to customer executives and internal leadership.

Strengthen Operational and Financial Performance

• Manage resource demand, utilization, capacity forecasts, delivery costs, and portfolio financial performance, including revenue and margin considerations.

• Establish meaningful performance measures covering resource coverage, delivery readiness, methodology adoption, customer outcomes, and operational effectiveness.

• Improve delivery consistency and efficiency through standardized practices, reusable assets, knowledge sharing, and reduced rework.

• Build a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and cross-regional collaboration, ensuring operational improvements deliver measurable customer and business value.

What You Will Bring

• 10+ years of progressive experience in Professional Services, consulting, enterprise software delivery, or related environments, including 5+ years of people leadership and responsibility for complex delivery portfolios.

• Proven experience leading Solution Architects, enterprise architects, senior consultants, or comparable customer-facing technical teams across multiple engagements and regions.

• Strong knowledge of SaaS, ERP, or enterprise platform architecture and implementation, with experience guiding complex customer transformations.

• Demonstrated success implementing and scaling delivery methodologies, architecture governance, reusable assets, and supporting tools across Professional Services organizations.

• Strong consulting operations and portfolio management experience, including resource planning, utilization, forecasting, delivery governance, risk management, and financial performance.

• Ability to influence regional and global stakeholders, translate delivery challenges into scalable improvements, and maintain consistency across distributed teams.

• Strong customer-facing leadership, executive communication, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to navigate complex technical and business decisions.

• Experience developing high-performing teams through coaching, hiring, capability building, performance management, and succession planning.

• Understanding of cloud delivery, integrations, data migration, and implementation dependencies within complex enterprise SaaS environments.

• Ability to identify and apply automation, AI-enabled tools, and delivery analytics where they can meaningfully improve efficiency, quality, and customer outcomes.

• 25 days annual leave plus 8 public holidays
• Choice to opt in for private Medical and Dental cover.
• Competitive pension plan.
• Thrive Flex Lifestyle Account (LSA) that allows you to contribute towards your health, financial or learning interests
• 5 charitable days to support the community that supports us
• Wellness
  • Headspace (mental health)
  • Wellbeats (virtual fitness classes)
• RethinkCare – caregiver support
• Diversity and inclusion programs that promote employee resource groups such as: Women in Technology, Pride and Go Green to name a few.
• Parental leave covering Maternity, Paternity and Adoption.
• Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team
• We Foster a learning culture with:
  • Educational Assistance Program
  • Professional development opportunities
  • LinkedIn Learning