Associate Director Cloud and Infrastructure Operations

A growing global pharmaceutical company is hiring an Associate Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Operations for the Americas region. This is a high-visibility role supporting cloud, data center, infrastructure operations, and infrastructure engineering across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

The organization is continuing to modernize its infrastructure environment, with a strong emphasis on cloud adoption, hybrid infrastructure, operational resiliency, scalable enterprise platforms, and stronger alignment between regional execution and global IT strategy. This role will be important in helping the Americas region support business-critical infrastructure while also contributing to broader cloud modernization and operational maturity efforts.

This is a strong opportunity for someone who enjoys working across both strategy and execution. The role will support AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, data center services, cloud migration, infrastructure modernization, vendor management, budget ownership, and partner-led delivery models. It is not a pure management role, and it is not a purely hands‑off architecture role. The company needs someone who can provide senior technical leadership, guide delivery teams, challenge vendors, manage costs, and stay close enough to the work to ensure strong execution.

While there are no direct reports currently assigned to this role, the position will lead and coordinate a large ecosystem of outsourced partners, consultants, and offshore resources. The role will also play an important part in helping the company build operational and engineering capability through its Global Capability Center model.

This is a direct hire role based in Clifton, NJ with a hybrid schedule of three days per week onsite.

The Associate Director, Infrastructure and Cloud Operations, will be responsible for leading cloud and data center services across the Americas region. This person will partner closely with global infrastructure leadership, regional IT leaders, security, application teams, vendors, and managed service partners to ensure the company’s cloud and infrastructure environment is reliable, scalable, secure, and aligned with global strategy.

This role owns both operational and engineering responsibilities for infrastructure services across the region. It requires a strong technical foundation in AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, data center operations, automation, and cloud-native infrastructure, along with the leadership ability to manage vendors, budgets, contracts, service delivery, and large partner teams.

• Lead cloud and data center infrastructure operations across the Americas region, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, with responsibility for AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, and on-premise data center environments.
• Partner with the Global Cloud and Data Center Lead on regional infrastructure strategy, cloud modernization, operational execution, roadmap planning, and alignment with global standards.
• Drive the transition from on-premise infrastructure toward scalable cloud-native, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud solutions, including migration planning, infrastructure modernization, and technical architecture guidance for AWS and Azure build solutions.
• Support infrastructure needs tied to enterprise applications, analytics, big data, machine learning, and other business-critical platforms, ensuring services are designed for availability, resiliency, performance, scalability, security, and compliance.
• Oversee regional infrastructure operations across U.S. data center locations and drive operational excellence in incident, problem, change, service delivery, monitoring, documentation, runbooks, and continuous improvement.
• Lead and coordinate outsourced partners, consultants, managed service providers, and offshore teams, setting clear expectations around service delivery, accountability, documentation, and performance.
• Help mature operational and engineering capabilities through the company’s Global Capability Center model.
• Manage cloud and infrastructure budgets, forecasting, procurement, vendor agreements, contract renewals, maintenance…