Senior Director, Cloud Operations

Foundant + smartsimple

About The Position

This role involves owning end-to-end cloud operations for Foundant's portfolio of SaaS products, ensuring high availability, performance, and reliability. The Senior Director will lead incident management, oversee configuration and change management, manage infrastructure hosting costs across multiple regions, and build and lead a team of system administrators and SREs. This position requires close collaboration with Development, Technical Security, and Support teams to maintain operational readiness and coordinate incident response. A key aspect of the role is establishing and improving monitoring, alerting, and performance management practices.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive experience in cloud operations or infrastructure leadership.
5+ years in a director-level role.
Deep, hands-on expertise operating and troubleshooting multi-cloud environments (AWS and Azure).
Experience managing availability and performance for SaaS products deployed across multiple geographic regions.
Working knowledge of regional data residency and compliance considerations (e.g., US, Canada, EU, UK, Australia).
Experience leading availability incident management and root cause analysis for production environments.
Experience overseeing configuration and change management across both infrastructure-as-code/CI-CD environments and traditional, manually managed release environments.
Experience managing cloud infrastructure hosting costs at scale, including forecasting and cost-optimization practices.
Experience building, managing, and developing teams of system administrators and/or Site Reliability Engineers.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field preferred.
Must be legally eligible to work in the United States.

Nice To Haves

Strategic Thinking: Translate Foundant's North Star into a clear cloud operations strategy, allocating team resources for maximum impact.
Performance Advancement: Set and maintain high standards for availability and performance, using data and monitoring for early detection and continuous improvement.
Decision-Making: Make timely, well-reasoned decisions during live availability incidents and communicate root causes effectively.
Collaboration and Learning: Build strong working relationships with peers in Development, Technical Security, and Support.
Change Management: Communicate incident root causes and operational changes with clarity and candor.
Staff Development: Coach team members with direct feedback, fostering technical depth and ownership.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end cloud operations across Foundant's portfolio of SaaS products, ensuring availability, performance, and reliability.
Lead availability incident management for production environments, including triage, resolution, and root cause analysis.
Serve as the primary presenter for incident readouts and RCAs to internal and external stakeholders.
Oversee configuration and change management practices across diverse environments (automated CI/CD to manually managed infrastructure).
Manage infrastructure hosting costs across multi-region footprints (US, Canada, EU, Australia, UK), balancing performance, compliance, and cost efficiency.
Build and lead a team of system administrators and SREs, fostering technical excellence and shared accountability.
Partner with Development, Technical Security, and Support peers to ensure clear operational readiness, incident response, and handoffs.
Establish and continuously improve monitoring, alerting, and performance management practices.
Perform other duties as assigned.