Sr Manager of Cloud and Platform Ops

Love's Travel Stops & Country Stores•Oklahoma City, OK

45d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Sr. Manager of Cloud and Platform Operations leads the strategy, engineering, delivery, and operational performance of Love’s cloud and on-premises platform estate, and the administration of the enterprise database platforms that run on it. This position directly leads the Platform Engineering, Platform Operations, and Database Administration teams, and is accountable for the availability, security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of the compute, storage, virtualization, cloud, and database services the business depends on. This role balances two mandates: keeping a large hybrid estate running reliably day to day, and advancing that estate toward modern, automated, product-oriented platform delivery. The Sr. Manager is responsible for stabilizing and reducing risk in legacy systems, driving engineering discipline and infrastructure-as-code practices, maturing database administration into a disciplined and automated operational service, and building the leadership bench beneath them. Database engineering and development are owned by a separate team; this role owns the administration, availability, and supportability of those database platforms in production. Success requires a strategic thinker with deep understanding of platform architecture and cloud operating models, strong financial and vendor acumen, and proven ability to lead managers, supervisors, engineers, architects, systems administrators, and database administrators.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field.
10+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, cloud, or platform services roles, including 5+ years of people leadership.
Experience leading multiple technical teams, including managers or supervisors.
Demonstrated experience managing an enterprise database administration function, including availability, backup and recovery, patching, and database security operations.
Demonstrated experience in budget ownership, service level management, and vendor negotiation and oversight.
Proven experience operating hybrid cloud environments at enterprise scale (AWS and/or Azure alongside on-premises data centers).
Oversight of both CapEx (e.g., hardware refresh, data center buildouts) and OpEx (e.g., licensing, cloud spend, support contracts) budgets.
Quality supervision: overseeing processes and organization, communication, coaching and providing feedback to employees, motivating others, promoting process improvement, and reporting.
Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical individuals and groups.
Strong analytical judgment; able to use operational and financial metrics to drive continuous improvement.
Sound decision-making under pressure during high-severity incidents.
Proficiency with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, including cloud operating models, networking, identity, and cost management.
Expertise in platform automation, monitoring, and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell/Python).
Strong grasp of enterprise platforms: data center infrastructure, virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V), storage, Windows and Linux, and observability stacks.
Working knowledge of enterprise database administration across technologies such as SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, including high availability, replication, backup and recovery, patching, and performance monitoring.
Strong understanding of DevOps and SRE methodologies, Agile practices, and ITIL service management frameworks.
Solid grasp of financial management principles related to technology investments and operational efficiency.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree preferred.
Relevant certifications such as AWS or Azure Solutions Architect / SysOps, VMware, Microsoft or Oracle database certifications, or ITIL are a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and develop the Platform Engineering, Platform Operations, and Database Administration teams, including subordinate managers and supervisors.
Provide role clarity, coaching, performance management, and accountability frameworks for managers, team leads, and senior technical contributors.
Build succession depth and technical career paths across platform engineering, platform operations, and database administration disciplines.
Foster a collaborative, accountable, and innovative culture that partners effectively with cybersecurity, application development, data, and business teams.
Plan staffing levels, skills mix, and use of contract or managed-service resources to meet service commitments.
Develop and execute a multi-year strategy for cloud and platform services, including cloud adoption, hybrid operating model, virtualization, compute and storage, and the operational estate of enterprise database platforms.
Define and maintain the architectural direction and standards for platform services, and the operational standards for database services; ensure alignment with enterprise architecture, security, and business objectives.
Lead initiatives in infrastructure modernization, automation, platform standardization, and self-service enablement for application teams.
Own the remediation, upgrade, or retirement roadmap for high-risk, end-of-life, and low-value legacy systems.
Stay current with industry trends and emerging technologies; evaluate and recommend tools, technologies, and processes that improve efficiency, reliability, and effectiveness.
Direct the design and implementation of scalable, highly available, secure, and automated platform solutions across cloud and on-premises environments.
Drive adoption of infrastructure as code, configuration management, and CI/CD practices for platform delivery (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Git-based pipelines).
Establish reusable patterns, golden images, landing zones, and guardrails that let application teams consume platform capabilities safely and quickly.
Partner with stakeholders to translate business and application requirements into technical designs and capacity plans.
Ensure platform designs meet security, compliance, resiliency, and disaster recovery requirements.
Oversee daily operations and maintenance of infrastructure platforms including AWS, Azure, VMware, and Windows and Linux server estates.
Ensure availability of mission-critical services through effective monitoring, incident management, and escalation processes, including on-call coverage.
Enforce adherence to change, configuration, problem, and patch management standards.
Develop and maintain runbooks, standard operating procedures, and operational documentation to ensure consistent service delivery.
Drive root cause analysis, post-incident reviews, and corrective actions that reduce repeat incidents and manual effort.
Review application requirements and anticipate system needs to ensure capacity, performance, and scalability.
Lead the day-to-day administration and lifecycle management of enterprise database platforms across on-premises and cloud-hosted environments.
Establish standards for database provisioning, patching, version currency, high availability, replication, backup, and recovery.
Monitor database health, performance, and capacity; identify issues and trends and escalate tuning or design needs to the database engineering team.
Ensure database security, access control, encryption, auditing, and compliance with regulatory and internal policy requirements.
Advance automation of routine database administration tasks to reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and shorten provisioning and maintenance cycles.
Ensure recoverability through tested backup and restore procedures aligned to business RPO and RTO requirements.
Partner with the database engineering team, which owns database design, schema, and development, by providing operational, supportability, and capacity input into new and changing database platforms.
Manage database change, release, and maintenance windows in coordination with application, data, and engineering teams.
Develop and manage CapEx and OpEx budgets spanning hardware refresh, data center and cloud consumption, licensing, database licensing, support contracts, and professional services.
Apply FinOps discipline to optimize cloud and platform spend, improve unit economics, and increase business value delivered per dollar.
Evaluate and negotiate vendor contracts, licensing models, and service-level agreements; manage vendor performance and escalations.
Track operational and financial KPIs and report on service cost, consumption trends, and forecast accuracy.
Define and manage service level objectives and operational metrics for platform and database administration services.
Drive standardization, automation, and elimination of recurring manual work across all three teams.
Support audit, compliance, and cybersecurity initiatives by ensuring systems and processes meet applicable standards and controls.
Lead proactive identification and remediation of performance bottlenecks, single points of failure, and reliability risks.
Work closely with other technology leaders, business units, and external partners to align platform initiatives with business objectives.
Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders and executive leadership.
Prepare and present reports, proposals, roadmaps, business cases, and technical documentation.
Ensure clear, consistent communication during major incidents, maintenance events, and platform changes.