Director, Cloud Infrastructure

Accommodations Plus International•Melville, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Director of Cloud Infrastructure & Technical Operations is the senior technical authority for the reliability, scalability, performance, and security of API's cloud-based platform and infrastructure. This hands-on, player-coach role combines expert AWS architecture and network engineering with leadership of globally distributed cloud, network, SRE, and DevOps teams. The role sets and reviews AWS architecture, including multi-account design, hybrid and multi-region networking, and security controls; owns AWS governance, system reliability, and service continuity; and acts as a primary bridge between technology operations and the business. The position is based in the United States or Canada and may be remote or hybrid. Standard hours are Monday through Friday during core business hours, with scheduling flexibility expected for regular collaboration with the Pune, India team. Occasional evening availability for major deployments and scheduled maintenance may be required. Occasional travel within the United States and Canada, and possibly to India, may be required. The role leads and develops globally distributed technical operations teams, sets organizational goals and performance expectations, participates in architecture reviews and major incident response, and partners with engineering, security, data, HR, and business teams. It owns global AWS governance and operations, cloud cost optimization, security controls, infrastructure-as-code standards, network architecture, reliability targets, observability, capacity planning, disaster recovery, business continuity, technical operations strategy, vendor relationships, compliance, and budget management. The position reports to the SVP of Infrastructure Engineering and Technical Operations and provides updates to executive leadership. The role requires extensive technology operations and AWS experience, senior technical leadership, strong cloud networking and security expertise, and the ability to lead teams and communicate with executives. A bachelor's degree in a related field is required, with equivalent experience considered; a master's degree or MBA is preferred. AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or equivalent is required. Compensation is listed at $160,000–$180,000 USD for the United States.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field; equivalent experience is considered.
15+ years in technology operations, infrastructure engineering, or cloud operations.
8+ years of hands-on production AWS design and operations.
5+ years leading technical teams in a director, senior director, head-of, or equivalent senior leadership role.
Experience managing distributed teams across multiple countries.
Expert knowledge of AWS compute, storage, database, and security services, including EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, EFS, EBS, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, IAM, GuardDuty, Security Hub, WAF, Shield, and Network Firewall.
Deep expertise in cloud and enterprise networking, including TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, IPsec VPN, load balancing, and TLS; experience designing hybrid connectivity and large-scale multi-VPC and multi-account architectures.
Hands-on proficiency with infrastructure as code using Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK; CI/CD; and scripting with Python, Bash, or equivalent.
Proven track record overseeing highly available, multi-region production systems with aggressive uptime and performance SLAs.
Experience managing cloud budgets, implementing FinOps, and presenting forecasts to executive leadership.
Experience with cloud security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, or PCI-DSS.
Experience owning observability platforms such as Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana, or equivalent, and driving metrics-based operational health.
Experience owning cloud infrastructure disaster recovery and business continuity programs, including regular testing and executive reporting.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or equivalent certification.
Strong people leadership, executive communication, strategic and operational capability, financial acumen, data-driven decision-making, and commitment to engineering excellence, blameless culture, and continuous learning.
Experience with AI-based automation capabilities for system self-healing, stability, and security.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree or MBA.
Experience overseeing staff in India.
AWS Advanced Networking – Specialty certification.
AWS Security – Specialty certification.
Experience leading technical operations at a SaaS or cloud-native company supporting enterprise customers with high availability and data security requirements.
Database reliability engineering experience, including RDS/Aurora tuning, failover testing, and backup/recovery validation.
Experience with enterprise network architecture beyond AWS, including SD-WAN, MPLS, next-generation firewalls, and ZTNA.
Familiarity with change management; ServiceNow or Jira Service Management experience is a plus.
Experience in travel technology, hospitality, or other high-volume, customer-facing SaaS.
Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, including data pipeline reliability and model serving on AWS.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and develop globally distributed technical operations teams and build a collaborative, high-performance culture.
Define team structure, roles, and career paths for cloud engineers, network engineers, SREs, and DevOps practitioners across locations.
Serve as the technical escalation point and mentor; participate in architecture reviews, major incident response, and root-cause analysis.
Set organizational goals, KPIs, and performance expectations; conduct reviews and provide ongoing coaching.
Partner with HR and talent acquisition to recruit and retain technical talent.
Collaborate with product engineering, security, data, and business teams to integrate operational requirements into the software development lifecycle.
Own governance and operations for the global AWS environment, including multi-account strategy, security controls, compliance posture, and cost management.
Drive cloud cost optimization through Reserved Instance and Savings Plans management, rightsizing, tagging governance, and FinOps practices.
Establish and enforce AWS security best practices, including IAM least privilege, SCPs, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, and CloudTrail logging.
Oversee multi-region and multi-AZ strategies to meet disaster recovery objectives, minimize RTO/RPO, and maintain availability.
Evaluate AWS services and infrastructure technologies and present adoption recommendations to senior leadership.
Define infrastructure-as-code standards, CI/CD-driven change, and Well-Architected reviews.
Own technical accountability for AWS network design, including multi-account and multi-VPC topologies, CIDR planning, segmentation, Transit Gateway routing, PrivateLink, and centralized egress and inspection.
Own hybrid connectivity between AWS, global offices, and partners, including Direct Connect, VPN, and BGP routing and failover design.
Design and operate DNS, edge, and traffic management using services such as Route 53, CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and Elastic Load Balancing.
Define network security architecture, including security groups, NACLs, Network Firewall, WAF, Shield, zero-trust access, and PCI workload segmentation.
Establish network observability and resilience; lead complex cross-region and hybrid incident troubleshooting and validate network failover during disaster recovery testing.
Define and own production SLAs and uptime commitments, set reliability targets with product engineering, and report performance to executive stakeholders.
Oversee monitoring and observability for proactive detection and rapid response.
Drive capacity planning so infrastructure can scale with growth while meeting performance and cost targets.
Own the IT disaster recovery and business continuity plan; lead tabletop exercises and failover testing.
Develop and execute a multi-year technical operations roadmap aligned with product strategy and growth objectives.
Report infrastructure health, cost, and initiative progress to the SVP of Infrastructure Engineering and Technical Operations and executive leadership.
Lead vendor relationships for cloud, infrastructure tooling, and managed services, including negotiations, SLA management, and performance reviews.
Ensure infrastructure compliance with regulatory and data privacy requirements, partnering with security on audit readiness.
Manage the technical operations budget, including headcount, tooling, and cloud spend, with forecasting and variance analysis.