Director of Higher Education Practice & Strategy
Job Description:
You will be Smart Panda Tools’ domain expert on new student admissions and transfer credit, the person who connects what colleges and universities need to what we build. You will pair a deep understanding of campus administrative workflows with enough technical fluency to sit between our higher education clients and our engineering teams. Working as a cross-functional hub, you will shape pre-sales consulting, onboarding and implementation, ongoing support, and new product design, bringing the same institutional expertise to each.
Why Join Us?
Smart Panda Tools builds the enterprise infrastructure that higher education institutions rely on to modernize transcript evaluation, automate credit articulation, and protect their academic authority. Our Student Mobility Suite is used by nearly 250 universities to process millions of transcripts without replacing the systems those institutions already depend on.
We are a team of higher education veterans, engineers, and enrollment operations experts. Many of us have sat in the Registrar’s chair, managed enterprise IT systems, and built the infrastructure to connect them. We build the technology we wish we had.
The people who thrive here care deeply about operational detail and student outcomes. They want to understand why institutions work the way they do before proposing a change. They bring strong opinions while remaining curious, and design for the specific rather than the generic.
Administrative friction should never obstruct the path to great education.
Key Responsibilities:
- Domain Leadership and Strategy: Serve as our internal expert on transfer articulation, credit evaluation, undergraduate and graduate admissions workflows, and registrar operations, and stay current with higher education trends, accreditation practice, state-wide articulation mandates, and policy shifts so our roadmap reflects where institutions are heading.
- Software Design and Engineering Liaison: Partner with product managers and architects to define and refine requirements for new modules and enhancements, take part in user acceptance testing so releases solve real registrar and admissions problems, and translate complex administrative rules and data structures into logic our engineers can build.
- Client Implementation and Onboarding: Lead implementation strategy for college and university clients, covering data mapping, business-process alignment, and user adoption, and guide institutional leadership through rollout, reducing risk and setting operational best practice.
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Lend credible, peer-to-peer expertise to sales during high-stakes demonstrations, discovery calls, and RFP responses, act as an escalation point for complex functional questions from existing clients, and keep a unified product feedback loop across Sales, Implementation, Support, and Engineering.
Required Qualifications:
- 8+ years working directly within college or university registrar or admissions offices, across more than one institution
- Deep functional knowledge of new student admissions and of transfer credit evaluation and articulation
- Extensive hands-on experience with enterprise student information systems such as PeopleSoft Campus Solutions or Ellucian Banner
- A proven record of implementing, configuring, or upgrading administrative software in a higher education setting
- Enough technical literacy to read data models, integration workflows, and API logic, and to work effectively with software engineers
- The presence to build immediate credibility and rapport with registrars, deans, and enrollment vice presidents
- A talent for turning ambiguous institutional processes into clear, structured software requirements
Preferred Qualifications:
- A master’s degree in higher education administration, information systems, or a related field
- Prior experience at an education technology vendor or a consulting firm
- Experience leading cross-functional teams and managing matrixed initiatives across sales, support, and development
Good to Know:
- This role can be filled at the Director or Senior Director level, depending on experience.
- Reports to the VP of Support and Engineering.
- This is a new, cross-functional leadership role spanning pre-sales, implementation, support, and product.