Senior Contracts & Legal Operations Manager | CLM | 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.

Ellucian has an exciting opportunity for a Senior Contracts & Legal Operations Manager to join its Legal team at our Reston, VA headquarters.

We are seeking a business-minded, technology-forward professional who brings a strong combination of commercial contract management, SaaS and technology agreement experience, and Legal Operations expertise.

This is a true hybrid role. You will be responsible for reviewing, managing, and conducting first-level negotiations of complex SaaS, software, services, and data privacy agreements while also helping transform how Ellucian's Legal organization manages contracts, technology, workflows, and processes.

A significant component of the role will be helping lead the implementation and ongoing optimization of Ellucian's contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform. Hands‑on experience with Ironclad is strongly preferred, but we are open to candidates with deep experience implementing, administering, or optimizing other leading CLM platforms.

If you enjoy negotiating technology contracts, improving how Legal gets work done, and using technology and automation to build more scalable processes, this could be a great fit.

• Manage contracts and conduct first-level negotiations of SaaS, software, licensing, professional services, data privacy, and other commercial technology agreements.
• Serve as a trusted Legal partner to Sales, Deal Desk, Order Management, IT, and other business teams, helping move deals forward while balancing Legal playbook positions with business priorities.
• Review, prepare, revise, and manage complex customer agreements while identifying contractual risks, escalating issues appropriately, and providing practical, business-oriented solutions.
• Develop and maintain contract templates, negotiation playbooks, clause libraries, policies, and contracting standards to improve consistency, efficiency, and scalability.
• Lead and support the implementation, deployment, and ongoing optimization of Ellucian's contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, serving as a key Legal stakeholder throughout the transformation.
• Own and help design CLM workflows spanning contract intake, template generation, review and negotiation, approvals, electronic signature, contract storage, reporting, and post‑execution management.
• Translate Legal and business requirements into scalable workflows, templates, approval rules, clause libraries, and system configurations.
• Partner with Legal, IT, Sales, Deal Desk, Order Management, and other stakeholders on requirements gathering, implementation planning, contract and data migration, system integrations, user acceptance testing, deployment and issue resolution.
• Develop and execute CLM adoption and change‑management strategies, including stakeholder communications, training, documentation, and ongoing support.
• Serve as a Legal business owner and subject‑matter expert for the CLM platform following implementation, establishing governance and continuously improving workflows and processes as business needs evolve.
• Leverage CLM data, reporting, and analytics to measure contract cycle times, identify bottlenecks, monitor…