The Director of Cloud Engineering is a senior engineering leader accountable for the strategy, architecture, and operational excellence of the company's multi-cloud platform. Reporting to the Sr. Director of IT Operations, this role owns the end-to-end cloud estate across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure, setting the technical direction for cloud-native infrastructure, platform engineering, and developer experience.
You will build and lead a high-performing distributed team of cloud engineers, SREs, and platform engineers while partnering closely with product, security, data, and application engineering to deliver a reliable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud foundation. This is a hands-on leadership role that balances deep technical credibility with the strategic thinking and organizational influence expected at the Director level.
Key Responsibilities:
Cloud Platform Strategy & Architecture
- Define and own the multi-cloud architecture strategy across GCP and Azure, aligning platform capabilities with business objectives, scalability requirements, and total cost of ownership targets.
- Lead architectural decisions for cloud-native workloads, including microservices, containerization (Kubernetes/GKE/AKS), serverless functions, and event-driven patterns.
- Drive the evolution of the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), enabling self-service infrastructure provisioning, golden-path templates, and standardized deployment pipelines.
- Establish and enforce cloud governance frameworks, including resource hierarchy, landing zones, policy-as-code, and guardrails across both cloud providers.
- Evaluate emerging technologies-AI/ML infrastructure, LLMOps tooling, edge compute-and make build-vs-buy recommendations grounded in cost, risk, and strategic fit.
Infrastructure Engineering & Operations
- Own Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and practices; ensure all infrastructure changes flow through version-controlled, peer-reviewed pipelines.
- Oversee GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipeline infrastructure, partnering with application teams to reduce deployment lead time and increase release frequency.
- Direct SRE practices across the cloud estate: define and track SLIs/SLOs, drive blameless post-mortems, and lead reliability improvements through systematic error-budget management.
- Own observability strategy-logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting-across cloud environments, ensuring engineers have actionable insight into system health and performance.
- Lead disaster recovery design, runbook development, and regular DR/BCP testing exercises; drive remediation of identified gaps to closure.
- Administer and maintain all Microsoft licensing through NCE and MPSA agreements
- Maintain network architecture and connectivity across cloud environments, data centers, and supported locations, including VPN, private connectivity (Interconnect/ExpressRoute), and DNS.
Security, Compliance & Risk
- Partner with the Security team to implement Zero Trust network architecture, enforce least-privilege IAM, and operationalize Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tooling.
- Ensure cloud environments meet regulatory and compliance requirements; support internal and external audits by providing architecture documentation, access logs, and control evidence.
- Define and maintain cloud security baselines, secrets management practices, and data encryption standards across the shared responsibility model.
- Drive incident response processes for cloud infrastructure events, ensuring timely escalation, containment, and root-cause resolution.
FinOps & Cloud Cost Management
- Own the cloud infrastructure budget; implement FinOps practices including cost allocation tagging, chargeback/showback reporting, reserved capacity planning, and rightsizing recommendations.
- Establish cloud cost visibility and governance mechanisms so engineering teams can make cost-aware architecture decisions in real time.
- Negotiate vendor agreements and manage strategic relationships with GCP, Azure, and key third-party tooling providers.
AI-Enabled Cloud Engineering
Evaluate, integrate, and champion the responsible use of AI tools across cloud engineering and platform teams, setting standards for AI-driven productivity and innovation.
Treat AI as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement - ensuring engineers maintain sound engineering judgment and that AI-generated code and configuration meet the same quality, security, and reliability standards as hand-written work.
Leadership & People Management
- Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of cloud engineers, platform engineers, and SREs (onshore and offshore); establish clear career ladders and development paths.
- Build a team culture grounded in psychological safety, continuous learning, and engineering excellence; champion internal tech talks, documentation habits, and knowledge sharing.
- Manage headcount planning, recruiting, and onboarding; partner with HR and technical leads to define roles and evaluate candidates.
- Deliver timely, constructive performance reviews; proactively manage performance issues and recognize high-impact contributions.
- Serve as a technical escalation path and executive sponsor for major infrastructure initiatives; represent the cloud engineering team in IT governance and steering forums.