VP, AWS Support

LPL Financial•Charlotte, TX

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

LPL Financial is seeking a VP, AWS Support to lead the Support team within its Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE). This role is responsible for the strategy, architecture, implementation, and operations of the CCOE's Tier 1/Tier 2 24x7 production support for the AWS landing zone. The Support team acts as the primary point of contact for application teams, handling ticket triage, account/IAM/access request fulfillment, runbook execution, automation of repeatable operations, change window execution, and major incident command. The role emphasizes an automation-first approach to minimize toil and improve operational efficiency. The VP will lead a globally distributed team across the US and India and will be a hands-on contributor to runbooks, Terraform code, and incident response.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive technical experience including 5+ years in cloud infrastructure or platform engineering leadership.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline (or equivalent work experience).
5+ years of hands-on production AWS at scale in a multi-account landing zone.
4+ years of authoring production Terraform in a private module ecosystem delivered through Terraform Cloud and GitHub Actions.
3+ years experience as a direct people manager of engineering teams of 5+ engineers, including hiring, performance management, compensation, and difficult personnel decisions.
5+ years experience leading and personally participating in 24x7 production on-call rotations in a fast-paced, security-conscious, regulated environment (financial services strongly preferred).
3+ years experience leading a 24x7 Tier 1 / Tier 2 cloud operations or cloud support function at enterprise scale, including ticket triage SLAs, major incident command, change-window execution, and the automation-down of repeatable requests.
Player-coach who is comfortable in code reviews, architecture sessions, and people 1:1s in the same day.
Continuous learner, especially in cloud-native, IaC, platform engineering, and applied AI.
Sets vision and translates ambiguous strategy into executable engineering roadmaps.
Bias for self-service, automation, and reducing toil for downstream internal customers.
Builds high-trust relationships across the US and India organization and across functions (Architecture, Security, FinOps, Application Engineering, Network, Audit).
Calm, decisive incident commander; fosters a strong post-incident learning culture.
Excellent written and verbal communication, executive presence, and ability to influence without direct authority.
Thrives in matrixed, fast-paced, regulated environments with imperfect information.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or MBA.
Experience building, scaling, or leading globally distributed engineering teams across the US and India / GCC.
Experience integrating agentic AI / GenAI tooling (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Bedrock, MCP) into platform, IaC, and engineering practice.
Strong scripting / programming proficiency in Python, Bash, or PowerShell.
AWS Solutions Architect - Professional.
AWS Certified Generative AI Developer - Associate.
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (004) or Authoring & Operations Certified.
Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).
Open-source contributions, public technical writing, or conference speaking on cloud, IaC, or platform engineering topics.
Experience with Backstage or another Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
Experience with FinOps practices and cloud cost management at scale.

Responsibilities

Lead the Support team in CCOE, owning the strategy, architecture, implementation, and operations of LPL's 24x7 Tier 1 / Tier 2 production support for the AWS landing zone.
Own inbound ticket triage from application teams across Jira and ServiceNow with clear SLAs, predictable routing, and escalation paths into the Foundations pods, Platforms, Containers, and Delivery, and to the Principal Engineer, Cloud Strategy Lead for cross-CCOE topics.
Own account / IAM / access-request fulfillment for the landing zone and continuously automate it down, aiming for self-service paths through the Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) and the private Terraform module library.
Own runbook authorship, ownership, and execution; pair with the Monitoring pod within Foundations on the feedback loop from incident response back into durable monitoring improvements and into the paved-road experience for application teams.
Own change-management execution for CCOE, including change-window planning and execution, change-advisory partnership with the enterprise change function, and ServiceNow change-record discipline.
Lead major incident command for production cloud incidents within CCOE's scope and partner with the Monitoring pod on alert routing into ServiceNow; drive blameless post-incident reviews to durable platform, runbook, and monitoring improvements.
Co-own the support paved road with the Functional Design Engineering & Strategy pod within Foundations, defining opinionated patterns for self-service, runbook templates, and the explicit definition of request types (self-service, Tier 1 / Tier 2, or escalate).
Embed agentic AI capabilities into the team's engineering practice and the platform's self-service experience for internal customers.
Embed agentic AI capabilities into the support function for AI-assisted ticket triage and routing, runbook generation, conversational self-service, and major-incident copilots.
Recruit, develop, mentor, and retain a globally distributed team of senior cloud engineers across LPL's US offices and India Global Capability Center (GCC).
Own all people-management responsibilities for the pod, including hiring, onboarding, weekly 1:1s, performance management, compensation planning, career development, and certification-path execution.
Operate as a player-coach, spending meaningful time hands-on in Terraform code, design reviews, peer reviews, and incident response while leading people and delivery.
Lead and personally participate in 24x7 on-call rotations as senior incident commander and technical escalation point for the pod.
Partner with peer VPs across the Cloud Center of Excellence to align roadmaps and remove cross-team and cross-pod blockers.
Champion AWS Well-Architected Framework adoption across all six pillars and drive continuous improvement against operational, security, reliability, performance, cost, and sustainability outcomes.
Contribute to and curate the private Terraform module library that powers self-service infrastructure for application teams.
Participate in Agile/Scrum ceremonies and partner with the RTE and PMO on delivery commitments and dependencies.
Represent the pod in executive forums, architecture review boards, internal audit, and customer engagements; communicate technical risk and trade-offs to non-technical executives.