Director Cloud Operations & Support

THE EMPIRE LIFE INS. CO• Any Canadian Location, CA,

2d•CA$197,800 - CA$247,800•Remote

About The Position

Empire Life is looking to hire a Director Cloud Operations & Support to join our IT team! We are actively seeking candidates to fill a current, open position. The Director Cloud Operations & Support is responsible for improving operational resiliency across the enterprise while leading the team through major technological shifts, including AI integration and the shift to cloud-first operations. The strategy is cornerstoned by the mandate to provide excellent internal service and reliability. The Director will establish a holistic system monitoring across all technologies, driving a proactive cultural shift, and embedding modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. Success requires a pragmatic balance between SRE automation and established processes like ITIL to ensure both high-velocity reliability and operational rigor. The Director will report to the Vice-President of IT Back Office.

Requirements

10+ years in IT, with 5+ in a senior operational leadership role.
Proven track record in establishing SLOs (Service Level Objectives), driving toil reduction, and running high-availability cloud environments.
Focus is on leveraging engineering practices to achieve operational excellence.
Cloud operational/security certs (e.g., AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer).
If you are applying for a position which is open to applicants across Canada, unless otherwise indicated in the position, language proficiency in English is required for communicating with customers, advisors, or employees across Canada.

Nice To Haves

Certifications in SRE/DevOps methodology are considered an asset

Responsibilities

Define Strategic Direction: Establish the overarching vision, long-term strategic roadmap, monitoring, and operational excellence across the entire technology ecosystem.
Implement Key Frameworks: Champion the adoption of SRE practices by creating and managing frameworks for Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Error Budgets to drive accountability and continuous improvement in service reliability.
Holistic System Coverage: Ensure the monitoring operating model provides comprehensive, real-time insight and coverage across all systems, from front-end applications to back-end infrastructure.
Stakeholder Management & Audit Interface: Serve as the primary interface with internal Audit and Compliance teams to ensure the health, stability, and control of all operational systems and processes are clearly understood and accurately documented.
Batch Process Modernization: Guide the crucial optimization of legacy overnight batch processes as they are migrated and modernized into efficient, cloud-native architectures.
Incident Management: Evolve and govern the standardized, high-velocity incident management process, focusing on rapid response, clear communication, and conducting blameless post-mortems to ensure system resilience and prevent recurrence.
Toil Reduction & Automation: Systematically identify, measure, and prioritize toil across engineering and operations teams, driving automation efforts to eliminate manual, repetitive work and free up engineering capacity for innovation and strategic projects.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Alignment: Actively assist with and inform the Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy based on reliability data and performance trends derived from the observability framework.
Shift to Proactive Operations: Lead the transformation of the helpdesk function to a proactive, agile operations team, focusing on incident prevention, rapid resolution, and continuous learning.
Team Development & Mentorship: Drive a necessary culture shift from reactive, batch-centric management to a proactive, cloud-first, full-stack observability mindset. This includes mentoring managers and technical teams on SRE practices and agile operations.
Continuity & Knowledge Transfer: Develop robust continuity plans and documentation processes to ensure resilience and consistency of operational knowledge across team members, mitigating single points of failure.
Governance & Tooling: Define and govern the implementation of new tools, processes, and automation necessary to support scalable, real-time performance and reliability insight.

Benefits

Hybrid work model
Competitive salaries with annual pay increases
Annual bonus program, which recognizes both strong company performance and individual contributions, for non sales positions
Access to learning & development programs, and education/tuition reimbursement (role dependent), to support your professional growth and career advancement.
A comprehensive employer-funded benefits package starting from day one of employment, that includes life insurance, health and dental and a generous health account
Flexible work arrangements and an annual allotment of personal health days.
Four weeks annual vacation from hire date
A defined contribution pension plan with generous employer matching
Top up programs for parental leave and compassionate leave
Employer-sponsored wellness and recognition programs
A cash employee referral program