VP, Container Engineering

Lead with Purpose, Unlock Your Team's Passion

At LPL, people leaders hold the key to the employee experience - shaping culture, driving performance, and guiding individuals to new heights. Because when that happens, we all win - clients, LPL, and most importantly our, employees.

Kubernetes at LPL is where an AWS-first cloud strategy meets the daily operational reality of a Tier 1 financial firm. We run Amazon EKS across a multi-account landing zone, partner with Fin Ops to make every node count, and deliver a paved-road, self-service experience that gets application teams to production safely and quickly. If you want to set the multi-year direction for containers - including potential expansion into ECS and Open Shift on-prem - while staying hands-on in cluster upgrades and incident command and leading a globally distributed team across the US and India, this is your seat.

As the VP, Container Engineering, you lead the Containers team in LPL's Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE). You own the strategy, architecture, implementation, and operations of LPL's container platform - primarily Amazon EKS - across our multi-account landing zone, and you set the direction for potential expansion into ECS as a workload-migration target and Open Shift on-premises as a hybrid runtime.

You partner closely with the Fin Ops pod (within Foundations) to make EKS more cost-effective while improving stability, and you deliver a paved-road, self-service experience for application teams. LPL is an AWS-first CCOE: a multi-account landing zone with 100+ private reusable Terraform modules that enable 60+ AWS services, all delivered through Terraform Cloud and Git Hub Actions. You are both a people leader for a globally distributed team across the US and LPL's India GCC and a hands-on senior platform engineer who contributes directly to cluster upgrades, Terraform/Helm modules, and incident response.

• Lead the Containers team in CCOE: own the strategy, architecture, implementation, and operations of LPL's container platform - primarily Amazon EKS - across the multi-account landing zone
• Set the multi-year container strategy: cluster topology, multi-tenancy, upgrade cadence, supported add-ons, ingress, service mesh (where applicable), Git Ops (ArgoCD/Flux), and CI/CD integration
• Partner closely with the Fin Ops pod (within Foundations) to drive container cost efficiency:
  Karpenter, Spot, right-sizing, namespace chargeback, Kubecost or equivalent, cost-anomaly detection, and platform-level Fin Ops guardrails
• Drive platform stability, reliability, and SRE practices: SLOs, golden signals, error budgets, capacity planning, controlled upgrades, and blast-radius reduction
• Deliver a self-service container experience for application teams: opinionated Terraform/Helm modules, golden paths, scaffolding, namespace vending, RBAC automation, and Internal Developer Platform (Backstage-class) integration
• Co‑own multi-account landing zone integration for containers in partnership with the Network Engineering, Security & Governance, Fin Ops, and Functional Design Engineering & Strategy pods within Foundations (IRSA, Pod Identity, network policy, Network Firewall integration, image signing, runtime defense)
• Lead the evaluation, design, and (if approved) operationalization of additional workload runtimes: ECS as a workload-migration target for cost and operational simplicity, and potential support for Open Shift on-premises as a hybrid runtime
• Embed agentic AI capabilities into the team's engineering practice (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Bedrock, MCP servers, agentic IaC and review workflows) and into the platform's self-service experience for internal customers
• Embed agentic AI capabilities into the container platform and developer workflow: AI-assisted manifest generation, automated upgrade impact analysis, copilots for cluster operators, and MCP-backed agents for self-service
• Recruit, develop, mentor, and retain a globally distributed team of senior cloud engineers across LPL's US offices and India Global Capability Center (GCC)
• Own all people-management responsibilities for the pod including hiring, onboarding, weekly 1:1s, performance management, compensation planning, career development, and certification-path execution per the CCOE certification matrix
• Operate as a player-coach: spend meaningful time hands-on in Terraform code, design reviews, peer reviews, and incident response while leading people and delivery
• Lead and personally participate in 24x7 on-call rotations as senior incident commander and technical escalation point for the pod
• Partner with peer VPs across the Cloud Center of Excellence - the leaders of the five CCOE teams (Foundations, Platforms, Containers, Support, Delivery) and the leaders of the pods within Foundations (Security & Governance, Fin Ops, Functional Design Engineering & Stra