Director Cloud Product — Platform Control Plane

RBC•Toronto, ON

3d•Onsite

About The Position

This role owns the end-to-end product strategy for platform control plane components, including resource lifecycle management, authentication/authorization, policy enforcement, and compliance automation. The goal is to create coherent horizontal services that support both IaaS and PaaS offerings. The position involves translating infrastructure complexity into simple, self-service developer experiences, defining and driving a multi-year roadmap for horizontal platform capabilities across different cloud providers and on-premises environments. It also requires partnering with platform architects and engineering leads to define technical product direction for multi-tenant infrastructure governance, owning the infrastructure controls engine, and driving the convergence of compliance and controls into a programmable engine. The role involves evaluating and prioritizing platform investments, defining and measuring product success through key metrics, and monitoring the cloud-native ecosystem to inform build-vs-adopt decisions. Additionally, it requires leading OKR-based planning and delivery, coordinating with various teams, serving as the primary product voice to executive leadership, translating platform strategy into business impact narratives, and partnering with FinOps and Security teams.

Requirements

Business Case Design
Critical Thinking
Knowledge Organization
Product Development Lifecycle
Product Development Methodology
Product Manufacturing
Product Services
Product Testing
Results-Oriented

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end product strategy for platform control plane components — resource lifecycle management, authentication/authorization, policy enforcement, and compliance automation — ensuring coherent horizontal services that underpin both IaaS and PaaS offerings
Translate infrastructure complexity into simple, self-service developer experiences — championing the principle of "abstracted complexity, consistent experience"
Define and drive the multi-year roadmap for horizontal platform capabilities, ensuring coherence across all cloud providers and on-premises environments
Partner with platform architects and engineering leads to define technical product direction for multi-tenant infrastructure governance — including admission control, infrastructure resource lifecycle management, and policy enforcement at the control plane layer
Own the infrastructure controls engine — the enforcement runtime, policy evaluation framework, and audit evidence pipeline.
Drive convergence of compliance and controls capabilities into a programmable engine — translating regulatory requirements (OSFI, internal risk frameworks) into automated, auditable platform controls that reduce manual overhead for consuming teams
Define and enforce platform contracts: what service providers must implement vs. what the control plane provides horizontally
Evaluates and prioritizes platform investments based on tenant adoption metrics, developer experience friction, compliance coverage gaps, and infrastructure cost efficiency — presenting trade-offs and recommendations to senior leadership
Defines and measures product success through platform health metrics — tenant onboarding velocity, self-service adoption rates, policy compliance coverage, and control plane reliability (availability, latency, reconciliation time)
Monitors the cloud-native ecosystem (CNCF projects, hyperscaler platform patterns, open-source control plane tooling) to inform build-vs-adopt decisions and maintain architectural currency across the platform
Lead OKR-based planning and delivery for the control plane product team with rigorous backlog discipline and transparent escalation of blockers
Coordinates across vertical product leads (IaaS, PaaS), platform engineering, security, and enterprise architecture to ensure horizontal services meet the needs of 1,000+ engineering teams while maintaining platform integrity and operational reliability
Serve as the primary product voice for the control plane to executive leadership
Translate platform strategy into business impact narratives: cost avoidance, time-to-production reduction, compliance posture, and developer productivity
Partner with FinOps on consumption models, chargeback design, and unit cost economics
Collaborate with Security, Build, and Compliance teams to ensure the control plane enforces governance-by-default