Director of Cloud Operations

Job Title

Director of Cloud Operations - US Only

VP Strategic Initiatives

Exempt

The Director of Cloud Operations leads end‑to‑end operations of the organization’s cloud infrastructure and services worldwide. The role is responsible for strategy, governance, reliability, cost‑efficiency, security/compliance, vendor management, and leading a global team of cloud operations, site reliability, and Dev Ops engineers. The individual works closely with business and technical stakeholders to align cloud operations with business objectives and scale for growth.

• Define and drive the global cloud operations strategy: including architecture operations, tooling, process standardization, global delivery model, and continuous improvement.
• Lead the global cloud operations organization: set vision, structure the team, recruit/retain talent, build capability, define performance metrics and OKRs.
• Ensure availability, performance, scalability and resilience of cloud services (public, private or hybrid) across all regions.
• Manage cloud cost and efficiency: work with finance and engineering to monitor, optimize and forecast cloud spend; implement cost‑control mechanisms and Fin Ops practices.
• Ensure global cloud security, compliance and governance: work with security, risk and legal teams to meet regulatory requirements (e.g., data residency, GDPR, HIPAA, industry‑specific standards).
• Design and oversee incident, problem, change and capacity management processes; lead major incidents and drive root‑cause analysis and remediation.
• Manage vendor/cloud provider relationships: contract negotiation, SLAs, performance monitoring, cost management, escalation management.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional stakeholders: application teams, product, operations, infrastructure, Dev Ops, network, security, and business units to align on cloud operations priorities and service delivery.
• Drive automation, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/observability, and self‑service capabilities to improve operational maturity and reduce time‑to‑value.
• Monitor and report key performance indicators (KPIs) for cloud operations globally (availability, MTTR, cost per unit, utilization, customer experience, security incidents) and present to senior leadership.
• Develop and maintain global cloud operations policies, standards, procedures, and playbooks; ensure consistency across regions and business units.
• Lead change management for cloud‑environment operational transformation, including migrations, region expansions, new platform rollouts, de‑commissioning legacy systems.
• Promote a culture of operational excellence, continuous improvement, learning (post‑mortems, blameless culture), and global team collaboration across geographies/time‑zones.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or equivalent;
  Master’s degree preferred.
• 7+ years in cloud operations, infrastructure, or IT operations roles, with at least 5 years managing multi‑region/global teams.
• Deep technical knowledge of major cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) and infrastructure‑as‑a‑service, platform‑as‑a‑service, hybrid and edge deployments.
• Proven track record managing large‑scale, mission‑critical production cloud environments (global footprint, 24×7, high availability).
• Demonstrated experience in cost management/Fin Ops, vendor management, cloud security/compliance and global governance.
• Strong leadership, strategic thinking, business acumen and stakeholder management skills—able to operate at senior executive level and across global teams.
• Excellent communication (verbal & written), influencing and negotiation skills; ability to present to the board/executive audience.
• Experience in process improvement, automation, Dev Ops culture, monitoring/observability, incident and problem management.

• Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect/Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, ITIL, PMP.
• Experience in highly regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, SaaS) and…