Sr. Manager Cloud and Infrastructure Engineering

Sr. Manager Cloud and Infrastructure Engineering

Lucas James Talent Partners is recruiting on behalf of UL Research Institutes and UL Standards & Engagement. We have an exciting opportunity for a Sr. Manager, Cloud and Infrastructure Engineering at UL Research Institutes and UL Standards & Engagement, based in Evanston, IL.

The Sr. Manager, Cloud and Infrastructure Engineering provides strategic leadership for the design, implementation, and management of UL Research Institutes (ULRI) and UL Standards & Engagement (ULSE) enterprise infrastructure. This role oversees both cloud (Azure and AWS) and on-premises environments, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness across all platforms.

The Sr. Manager leads a multidisciplinary team of cloud engineers, HPC engineers, system engineers, and managed service providers, partnering with architecture, security, digital platforms, and IT operations teams to deliver a robust technology foundation that supports business growth, scientific research, and digital innovation.

This leader will set the strategic direction for cloud adoption, automation, and infrastructure optimization while fostering a culture of reliability, performance, and continuous improvement.

UL Research Institutes and UL Standards & Engagement

At UL Research Institutes (ULRI) and UL Standards & Engagement (ULSE), we expand the boundaries of safety science to create a more secure and sustainable world. For more than a century, we have studied the unintended consequences of innovation, designed solutions to mitigate risk, created new safety standards and shared our findings with academia, scientists, manufacturers, and policymakers across industries. We identify critical safety and sustainability issues, asking the tough questions because we believe a safer world begins with knowledge.

What you’ll learn and achieve:

As the Sr. Manager, Cloud and Infrastructure Engineering, you will play a key role in the rapid growth of UL as you:

• Lead multi-year cloud and infrastructure strategy:
  Define and execute strategic roadmaps that align with organizational priorities, ensuring modernization, scalability, and secure hybrid integration across on-prem and cloud environments.
• Drive modernization and migration initiatives:
  Oversee the design and execution of cloud adoption, data center transformation, and platform upgrades to deliver seamless, resilient, and future-ready infrastructure with embedded continuous improvement principles.
• Establish engineering standards and best practices:
  Define and enforce policies for infrastructure, cloud usage, automation, and service delivery in alignment with Enterprise Architecture and Information Security.
• Advance automation and Dev Ops maturity:
  Champion Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and container orchestration (Kubernetes) to increase speed, consistency, and reliability.
• Implement Fin Ops and cost optimization practices:
  Apply financial operations principles to manage cloud and infrastructure spend, budgeting, and chargebacks, optimizing resource utilization and performance.
• Engineer hybrid and cloud-native platforms:
  Oversee design, implementation, and maintenance of cloud, on-prem, and HPC environments that power AI, analytics, and research workloads with high availability and observability.
• Ensure operational excellence and resilience:
  Govern managed service providers (MSPs), define KPIs/OKRs, and lead post-incident reviews, disaster recovery, and continuous performance optimization.
• Drive HPC, AI and computation excellence and adoption:
  Lead the design, implementation, and optimization of high-performance and AI computing infrastructure; ensure scalability, performance tuning, and system integration; and promote HPC adoption across research and engineering teams to accelerate AI and scientific innovation.
• Collaborate across IT domains and technology teams:
  Partner with Digital Platforms, Operations, and other technology teams to ensure infrastructure foundations, APIs, and integration layers enable automation, digital workflows, and data interoperability.
• Develop and empower high-performing teams:
  Lead,…