Director, Technical Products and Operations

Real Chemistry•Chicago, MA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Real Chemistry is seeking a hands-on Director, Technical Product Operations to own the end-to-end management, operation, and security of our flagship client-facing SaaS products. These platforms are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivered to clients as a commercial product, engineered to be SOC 2 compliant, and increasingly powered by AI-enabled features. This is a working leadership role — not a purely strategic one. The successful candidate is a technically credible, roll-up-your-sleeves operator who has personally implemented and run a product on AWS infrastructure, and who can lead a team while remaining directly engaged in architecture, deployment, security, and production support. You will be the single point of accountability for platform availability, performance, security posture, and the fully-supported client experience.

Requirements

Hands-on track record — the candidate must be a practitioner who has personally implemented and operated a product on AWS infrastructure, not solely a manager of others who do.
Demonstrated experience implementing a product on AWS (compute, networking, databases, IAM, IaC) from build through production operation.
7+ years in IT / platform engineering / cloud operations, including 3+ years operating production workloads in AWS.
Prior leadership or people-management experience, ideally leading external IT, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering functions.
Strong working knowledge of SOC 2 (and adjacent frameworks) and the practical implementation of the underlying controls.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud security best practices (least-privilege IAM, secrets management, logging/audit).
Proven ownership of production reliability — SLAs, incident response, on-call, and HA/DR.
Excellent communication skills — equally comfortable with hands-on technical teams and C-suite stakeholders.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience delivering a client-facing / commercial SaaS product (multi-tenant, externally sold).
Experience productionizing AI / LLM-enabled features and governing AI usage, data handling, and cost.
Familiarity with regulated or enterprise-client environments (HIPAA-adjacent, GDPR, GxP).
Experience with containerization/orchestration (ECS/Fargate, EKS), AWS Lambda, and observability tooling.
Relevant certifications (AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps / Security, CISSP, CCSP).

Responsibilities

Own the full lifecycle of the client-facing SaaS products hosted on AWS — from infrastructure design and deployment through ongoing operation, optimization, and support.
Architect, implement, and maintain scalable, resilient AWS environments (compute, storage, networking, databases, backups) with clear separation across development, staging, and production.
Lead high-availability and disaster-recovery (HA/DR) design, including backup, failover, and recovery procedures, to meet client and contractual uptime commitments.
Manage infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and controlled promotion paths between environments.
Own observability — metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting — and drive continuous improvement of platform performance and cost efficiency (FinOps).
Maintain and continuously mature the platform's security posture, ensuring controls are designed, implemented, evidenced, and audit-ready.
Own SOC 2 compliance for the platform — partnering with Information Security and external auditors to sustain Type I and progress toward Type II attestation.
Enforce least-privilege identity and access management (AWS IAM), encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, and tamper-evident audit logging.
Coordinate third-party penetration testing, vulnerability management, and remediation within defined risk timelines.
Ensure client-facing security, data-handling, and confidentiality requirements are met and clearly documented for client assurance.
Support the secure integration and operation of AI/ML and LLM-enabled features within the product, including approved AI providers, usage boundaries, and cost guardrails.
Partner with engineering and data teams to productionize AI capabilities with appropriate data classification, DLP, and human-in-the-loop controls where required.
Ensure the product is fully supported — establishing SLAs, incident response playbooks, on-call coverage, and runbooks for production systems.
Serve as senior escalation point for platform incidents, driving rapid resolution and transparent client communication.
Own change management, release governance, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve reliability.
Lead, and mentor the external IT / platform engineering team, setting technical standards and delivery discipline.
Partner closely with Information Security, Product, and Client-facing teams to align platform capabilities with commercial and client needs.
Communicate platform health, risk, and roadmap clearly to both technical teams and executive / C-suite stakeholders.
Manage relationships with key vendors and third parties (AWS and supporting services).