Fast Facts

This role involves leading IT functions to enhance application resilience and agility across SEI Business Units, focusing on cloud-native solutions, AI-driven development, and automation.

Responsibilities: Establishing sub-function strategy, managing budgets, aligning IT with business goals, leading a large engineering team, and ensuring compliance with regulations.

Skills: Requires expertise in cloud-native architectures, AI and automation, cybersecurity, and strong leadership abilities.

Qualifications: Bachelor's degree required, 15+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years in a leadership role; advanced degree preferred.

Location: This position is based in Minneapolis, MN, with occasional travel required.

Compensation: $165000 - $300000 / Annually

Lead IT functions that support platform/applications engineering and Enterprise capabilities across SEI Business Units by ensuring agility, scalability, and automation, ensuring that enterprise applications remain resilient, adaptable, and aligned with business strategy.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Owns and establishes sub-function strategy
• Decisions in scope of this role have a significant impact on business results and enterprise practices
• Aligning with company goals and OKRs
• Preparing and allocating budgets and ensuring tracking of the budgets per plan
• Set performance and financial goals and attain them through team direction and management
• Assess, evaluate, and report on overall team and individual team member performance through a scorecard review process
• Ensure compliance with company policies and local, regional and federal regulations
• Build and approve the department’s hiring plan
• Guide and support Directors and managers and develop team talent

Cloud-First, SaaS-Powered Architecture:

• Prioritizing SaaS and cloud-native solutions over legacy systems

AI & Hyper-Automation-Enabled Development:

• Implementing AI-driven software engineering (Copilot, AI-assisted coding, test automation)
• Automating DevSecOps to ensure continuous security and compliance

Event-Driven & Composable Enterprise:

• Designing applications with event-driven and composable architecture (Kafka, Pub/Sub)

Data-Driven Engineering & Observability:

• Integrating real-time data pipelines for decision-making
• Leveraging AI-powered insights for proactive issue resolution

Cybersecurity & Compliance by Design:

• Embedding Zero Trust principles into application security
• Ensuring compliance automation with regulatory standards

Developer Experience & Platform Engineering:

• Providing developer self-service platforms (Internal Developer Portals, Backstage.io)
• Automating onboarding, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code
• Investing in developer productivity and upskilling in AI, cloud, and security
• Oversee core enterprise infrastructure operations across SEI globally, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Lead platform engineering efforts to enable reusable, secure, and standardized platform capabilities across business units.
• Own and drive the enterprise data infrastructure strategy, including data platforms, pipelines, and governance frameworks.
• Manage identity and access management (IAM) capabilities, ensuring secure and compliant user access across systems.
• Lead the cloud infrastructure strategy across SEI, including public cloud adoption, hybrid cloud models, and cost optimization.
• Establish and scale DevSecOps practices, embedding security throughout the development and deployment lifecycle.
• Define and enforce enterprise-wide technology standards for platforms, infrastructure, and operations to ensure global consistency.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to drive platform modernization initiatives that align with SEI’s digital transformation goals.

Job Skills:

Strategic & Leadership Capabilities:

• Vision for enterprise technology modernization
• Ability to align IT applications with business growth
• Experience leading large, distributed, and AI-enabled engineering teams
• Strong stakeholder management and communications capability with C-suite and business leaders

Technical Expertise:

• Cloud-native architectures preferably Google Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and SaaS ecosystems
• Experience with microservices, API-led development, and event-driven architecture
• Deep understanding of AI/ML in software development & automation
• Proficiency in DevSecOps, CI/CD, and platform engineering best practices
• Expertise in enterprise integration, middleware, and data pipelines

AI, Automation & Observability:

• Experience leveraging AI-powered development tools
• Strong knowledge of AI-driven observability, self-healing applications
• Hands-on experience with hyper-automation (RPA, AI-Ops, ChatOps)

Agile & Change Management:

• Proven experience in agile transformation at scale
• Familiarity with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Spotify model, or similar
• Ability to drive cultural change towards an experimentation mindset

Cybersecurity & Risk Management:

• Deep understanding of Zero Trust, application security, and compliance frameworks
• Experience with automated security testing & AI-driven threat modeling

Talent Development & Team Building

• Ability to attract, retain, and upskill top engineering talent
• Ability to design and implement sub-function strategies
• Work with a global team mindset
• Excellent communication skills and ability to convey complex issues in a concise and clear manner.
• Displayed business acumen and enterprise awareness.
• Understanding of the core levers that drive organization success.

Work Experience:

• 15+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years leading large teams

Education:

• Bachelor’s Degree in relevant field required; advanced degree preferred

Other:

• Must be able to travel occasionally should a business need arise. For most roles travel would not be common. Travel may involve plane, car or metro. In accordance with ADA policies, reasonable accommodations regarding travel limitations can be provided. Travel will be more common for roles such as Account Executives (25 - 50%), senior leaders (10 – 20%) or Capella Core Faculty (5 – 10%). 
• Ability to work onsite in Corporate or Campus location (in a typical office environment) may be required based on role. If so, this would include being mobile within the office, including movement from floor-to-floor using elevators or stairs.
• If offsite or hybrid role, must have access to work in setting which enables meeting all requirements of the role (including privacy, reliable internet access, phone, ability to video conference, etc.) at a remote location.
• Faculty and Federal Work Study roles require access to work in setting which enables meeting all requirements of the role (including computer, privacy, reliable internet access, phone, ability to video conference, etc.) at a remote location.
• This role may require lifting, however reasonable accommodations will be provided in accordance with our ADA policies.
• Must be able to meet critical thinking and problem solving aspects aligned to job duties, as well as effectively communicating with co-workers.
• Must be able to work more than 40 hours per week when business needs warrant. Accommodations related to schedule may be considered. 
• Able to access information using a computer.
• Other essential functions and marginal job functions are subject to modification.

#LI-RM1

SEI offers a comprehensive package of benefits to employees scheduled 30 hours or more per week. In addition to medical, dental, vision, life and disability plans, SEI employees may take advantage of well-being incentives, parental leave, paid time off, certain paid holidays, tax saving accounts (FSA, HSA), 401(k) retirement benefit, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, tuition assistance as well as entertainment and retail discounts. Non-exempt employees are eligible for overtime pay, if applicable.

Careers - Our Benefits, Strategic Education, Inc

SEI is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive and collaborative culture where individuals can grow their careers and contribute fully. We strive to attract talent with broad experiences, skills and perspectives. We welcome applications from all. While it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top end of the pay range at SEI, we offer a competitive salary. The actual base pay offered to the successful candidate may vary depending on multiple factors including, but not limited to, job-related knowledge/skills, experience, business needs, geographical location, and internal pay equity. Our Talent Acquisition Team is ready to discuss your interest in joining SEI. The expected salary range for this position is below.

$165,000.00 - $300,000.00 - Salary

If you require reasonable accommodations to complete our application process, please contact our Human Resources Department at [email protected].