The Engagement
Embedded directly within the internal Ellucian web team as the primary backend engineering resource responsible for the structural integrity, security, and deployment pipeline of a high-traffic, global enterprise SaaS marketing platform hosted on Acquia Cloud. Originally contracted in 2018 to architect and launch the foundational Drupal 8 site, the partnership spans nearly a decade of continuous lifecycle modernization—guiding the platform through Drupal 9 and 10 architectures, and ultimately inheriting the codebase back for full ownership following a recent Drupal 11 redesign.
Key Contributions
- Direct Team Augmentation & Component Engineering
Partner daily with internal stakeholders to architect, write, and deploy robust custom Drupal modules to fulfill evolving corporate business logic. Occasionally step in to directly design and develop modular, reusable frontend components, bridging the gap between custom backend functionality and modern, responsive content layouts for the marketing team.
- Technical SEO & Localization Auditing
Executed a comprehensive technical SEO audit to diagnose and resolve indexing discrepancies, routing errors, and "ghost" URL crawl issues leftover from a recent platform redesign. Optimized cache invalidation protocols, node access rules, and internationalization settings to ensure strict language code and canonical compliance across localized regions (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, and English content instances).
- MarTech & Third-Party Integrations
Support the marketing and analytics teams by managing and troubleshooting complex tracking infrastructures. Oversee Google Tag Manager (GTM) configurations, debug asynchronous third-party script integrations, and optimize script loading sequences to prevent tracking data gaps while maintaining peak page-load performance and script containment.
- Enterprise Performance & WebOps
Architected and optimized the platform to sustain heavy global traffic on Acquia Cloud. Integrated and configured advanced caching layers and high-performance Drupal Views, backed by Memcache, Varnish, and Cloudflare, to ensure sub-second response times and high availability.
- Dynamic Campaign Frameworks
Designed and developed a modular, code-free campaign template system. This empowered the corporate marketing team to rapidly spin up unique, high-impact campaign pages on demand directly through the Drupal administrative interface without requiring developer intervention or code deployments.
Timeline: 2018 – Present (Continuous Optimization & Architecture)
Core Stack: Drupal 8 / 9 / 10 / 11, PHP, Symfony, Acquia Cloud, Cloudflare, Drupal Views, MarTech & Analytics Integrations
Note: Original 2018 platform architecture, multi-version migrations, and current Drupal 11 lifecycle management delivered by nah design in direct partnership with the Ellucian web team. Intermediate design overhauls and recent full-stack rebuilding phases were executed by partner agencies including Lullabot and Eight25Media, with long-term engineering and deployment subsequently transitioned back to nah design for ongoing ownership.
