Senior Director, Integrations

The posting, as Element451 wrote it

Element451 is the AI-first CRM and student engagement platform for higher education. Our platform helps colleges and universities manage the full student lifecycle, from first inquiry through enrollment and student success. Institutions run their admissions, marketing, engagement, and retention operations on Element451, which means our platform has to connect reliably with the systems campuses already depend on - starting with their Student Information System.

The Role

Integrations are the connective tissue between Element451 and the systems campuses run on - student information systems first, and learning management and other API-based systems over time. Today we sell a managed integration package: rather than handing customers an API and a manual, Element451 scopes, builds, and maintains each institution's integration for them. That model is a competitive advantage, and it needs a single owner on the delivery side.

We're hiring a Senior Director, Integrations to own the entire post-sales integration lifecycle. Your organization takes the baton once a deal is signed and owns everything downstream: validating the signed SOW, architecting the integration, building it, and keeping it healthy for the life of the account. You'll lead an existing team of integration architects, integration engineers, and live support specialists.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not a slide-deck one. You are the senior subject-matter expert on SIS integrations - you don't need to write the code, but you must understand deeply how these integrations are built so you can scope them, direct your architects and engineers, and pressure-test an approach yourself. This isn't a Product role, but you'll be one of Product's closest partners - helping shape what we build natively so integrations become progressively less custom over time.

What You'll Own

• SOW validation. Own the technical handoff from Sales into Delivery. Once a deal is signed, validate that the integration as scoped and sold is technically feasible and correctly sized before your team commits to the build — and surface gaps, risks, or missing requirements early, before they become escalations.
• Integration architecture and scoping. Be the senior SME who, working with your integration architects, defines how each integration is designed — data models, sync patterns, authentication (OAuth, SAML, API keys), error handling, and how we ride frameworks like Ellucian Ethos. Set the reference patterns and standards that make every new build faster and more repeatable, and grow the IA team's depth in this space.
• Integration build. Own the integration engineering team and the delivery of every integration through build, UAT, and go-live — after which bidirectional syncs between Element451 and the SIS run as Dagster jobs (cron schedules plus event-driven sensors) over the Ethos API. Own build quality, timelines, and the tooling and runbooks that let the team deliver consistently.
• Flat-file and o

[…]
th MongoDB and a Snowflake/dbt data layer. You can read a payload and pressure-test an architecture even when you're not the one writing the code.

• A team builder. You've grown and structured technical delivery teams — architecture, engineering, and support — and set the process and tooling that make delivery repeatable and reliable.
• A clear communicator who moves fluently between campus registrars, IT directors, your own engineers, executives, and Sales and Product partners.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a higher ed SaaS company (CRM, SIS, enrollment or curriculum tech).
• Depth across more of the platforms we integrate - Workday Student, Anthology/Campus Nexus, Populi, Destiny One, or CFNC - in addition to Banner and Colleague.
• Experience turning a managed/services offering into productized, repeatable capabilities in partnership with Product.
• Hands-on with code-based orchestration (Dagster or similar), event-driven architectures, containerized deploys (Docker/AWS ECS), and integration monitoring/observability (e.g., Sentry).

Why Element451

You'll own a function that touches every customer - integrations are often the deciding factor in whether an institution can adopt us at all. You'll inherit an established team of architects, engineers, and support specialists, executive backing, and a clear mandate: run integration delivery as a tight, reliable operation and steadily turn high-touch custom work into a scalable, productized advantage.

OUR VALUES

• Impactful not Immediate - We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful.
• Progress before Perfection - We are action-oriented people. We are empowered to make decisions and achieve our goals.
• Learners before Masters - We are curious and humble people who strive to constantly improve.
• Together not Alone - We rally behind each other and pitch in to support the greater whole.
• Customer Success not Support - We solve partner goals and prioritize their success.