Director of Cloud Operations

About the role

The Director of Cloud Operations will take ownership of two critical, closely related functions: our outsourced IT operations delivered through a managed service provider (MSP), and our internal AWS DevOps team. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can operate at both the strategic level — vendor management, budget, roadmap, cloud architecture, automation, and reliability.  This role will serve as the single point of accountability for the reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness of our IT operations and cloud infrastructure, bridging the gap between an external MSP and an internal engineering team so that both operate against one set of standards, one roadmap, and one incident-response process.

Key Responsibilities

MSP & IT Operations Management

• Own the day-to-day and strategic relationship with our IT operations MSP, including contract negotiation, renewals, and pricing.
• Define and enforce SLAs and KPIs for the MSP covering uptime, ticket response/resolution times, patching cadence, and security compliance.
• Hold regular business and technical reviews with the MSP; escalate and resolve performance issues.
• Evaluate ongoing build-vs-buy decisions — determining which IT operations functions should remain with the MSP versus move in-house.
• Oversee MSP-managed helpdesk, network, endpoint, and infrastructure services to ensure they meet business needs.

AWS DevOps Leadership

• Directly manage and grow the internal AWS DevOps team, including hiring, mentoring, and performance management.
• Set technical direction for cloud architecture, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and observability.
• Own AWS cost management and optimization, including rightsizing, reserved capacity/savings plans, and tagging governance.
• Drive infrastructure security best practices in partnership with the security team (IAM, network segmentation, secrets management, compliance controls).
• Champion automation and self-service tool to reduce manual operational work and improve developer velocity.

Cross-Functional & Strategic Leadership

• Unify incident management, on-call, and change-management processes across the MSP and DevOps team so there is one escalation path regardless of where an issue originates.
• Build a single set of operational metrics and dashboards (uptime, MTTR, deployment frequency, cost per workload) and report them to executive leadership.
• Own the combined IT operations and cloud infrastructure budget.
• Develop and maintain a multi-year cloud operations and IT infrastructure roadmap aligned with company growth plans.
• Partner with security, compliance, product, and engineering leadership on audits, certifications (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001), and disaster recovery / business continuity planning.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
• 8+ years of progressive experience in IT operations, infrastructure, or cloud engineering, including 3+ years in a people-management or leadership role.
• Proven experience managing a managed service provider (MSP) or other significant outsourced IT vendor relationships, including contracts and SLAs.
• Hands-on experience with AWS at a production scale (e.g., EC2, VPC, IAM, RDS, ECS/EKS, Lambda, CloudWatch).
• Experience leading a DevOps or SRE team, with strong understanding of CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation), and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Track record of owning budgets, vendor negotiations, and cost optimization for cloud or IT infrastructure spend.
• Strong incident management background, with experience building or improving on-call and escalation processes.
• Excellent communication skills, including experience presenting metrics and roadmaps to executive stakeholders.
• Familiarity with ITIL or similar IT service management frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS certification (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, or equivalent).
• Experience in a regulated or compliance-driven industry (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001).
• Prior experience consolidating or transitioning services between an MSP and an internal team.