Director of Cloud Operations

Springbrook Holding Company LLC•,

12d•Remote

About The Position

Springbrook is looking for a Director of Cloud Operations to lead its Cloud Operations team. Cloud Operations brings together site reliability engineering, platform engineering, and FinOps disciplines to keep a modern, cloud-native SaaS platform secure, available, performant, and cost-efficient. Our mission is to protect and continuously improve the software and systems of Springbrook, with an emphasis on security, availability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency - DevOps and platform engineering with a software engineering mindset. In this role you will lead, grow, and develop the team of Cloud Operations engineers accountable for keeping the Cirrus platform available, secure, performant, and cost-efficient for 3,000+ government agencies. You will own the cloud and reliability strategy and roadmap, set the engineering standards and service level objectives the team operates against, mature our incident management, platform engineering, and automation programs, and represent the operational and cost posture of the platform to executive leadership and customers. This is a leadership position for someone who has come up through deep technical cloud infrastructure work and now wants to scale their impact through a team. This position is 100% remote.

Requirements

A degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field; or equivalent practical experience
A minimum of ten years' experience supporting cloud-native applications and infrastructure, including at least three years directly managing and developing a team of engineers
A proven track record leading cloud operations, site reliability engineering, or platform engineering for a multi-tenant SaaS platform, with personal accountability for uptime, availability, and cost commitments
A thorough working knowledge of Azure (or an equivalent major cloud provider), sufficient to guide and review the design, deployment, and management of IaaS, PaaS, and container-based (Kubernetes or equivalent) services, including their security and compliance capabilities
Sufficient depth in infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent), GitOps and CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or similar), and modern observability platforms (e.g., Azure Monitor, OpenTelemetry, Log Analytics, Application Insights, or equivalent) to set standards and evaluate the technical decisions of the team
Demonstrated experience defining service level objectives and error budgets, and running a formal incident management and postmortem program
Experience operating containerized and traditional Windows/Linux server environments at scale, with a solid grasp of modern IT operations practices, network design, and identity management (Entra ID or equivalent, including zero-trust principles)
Experience supporting compliance and audit frameworks such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, or NIST
Experience with FinOps practices, cloud cost management, capacity and demand planning, and ownership of a team budget
Ability to attract, retain, and develop engineering talent, and to build an on-call culture that is sustainable for the team
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to present clearly to executive leadership and customers
Strong analytical, prioritization, and problem-solving skills, with attention to detail and a bias toward repeatable, automated process
An effective cross-functional collaborator who can lead through influence as well as direct authority
Maintain general awareness of Springbrook security and privacy policies
Report any security incident or suspected security incident to the Springbrook Incident Response Team

Nice To Haves

Experience in government technology, public sector, or another highly regulated industry
Experience scaling a cloud operations or SRE function from a small team into a mature, platform-oriented practice
Experience leading distributed, remote, or offshore engineering teams
Familiarity with PCI DSS requirements
Familiarity with ITSM and ITIL service management practices
Familiarity with FinOps Foundation practices and cost optimization tooling (e.g., Azure Cost Management, CloudHealth, or similar)

Responsibilities

Lead, grow, and develop a team of Cloud Operations engineers, including hiring, onboarding, coaching, goal setting, performance management, and career development
Own the technical vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for the availability, scalability, performance, security, and cost efficiency of Springbrook's cloud platform and systems
Define and own service level objectives, service level indicators, and error budgets for customer-facing services; hold the organization accountable to them and report results to executive leadership
Establish the standards, architectures, guidelines, and review practices the team applies to infrastructure as code, containerization and orchestration, CI/CD, observability, and change management, and ensure they are adopted consistently across the platform
Champion a DevSecOps and zero-trust approach, partnering with Security and Product Development leadership to embed reliability and security requirements into the software development lifecycle
Own the incident management program end to end, including on-call structure, escalation paths, severity definitions, customer communication, and blameless postmortems; drive systemic remediation so issues do not recur
Set the automation and self-service platform strategy that reduces operational toil and manual load, with measurable targets for coverage and progress, including the use of AI-assisted and AIOps tooling where it improves reliability or speed
Own capacity planning, demand forecasting, and FinOps practices - cloud cost management, optimization, and chargeback - for the Azure (and any additional cloud) footprint; manage the team's budget, tooling investments, and vendor relationships
Define release engineering and GitOps-based deployment practices that increase deployment frequency and speed while lowering change failure rate
Own the Cloud Operations contribution to compliance programs (PCI, SOC 2, NIST, etc.), including control design, evidence collection, and audit support
Identify, implement, and report the KPIs and operational metrics that measure the success of our services, and translate technical risk and cloud spend into business terms for executive and customer audiences
Prioritize and manage the team's work across competing demands, adhering to critical project timelines in a fast-paced environment
Serve as a leadership escalation point for major service interruptions and security incidents, and participate in a leadership on-call rotation
Build a team culture of meticulous documentation, repeatable process design, platform thinking, and continuous improvement
Maintain general awareness of Springbrook security and privacy policies
Report any security incident or suspected security incident to the Springbrook Incident Response Team