VP, Infrastructure Platforms

Northwestern Mutual•Milwaukee, WI

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Every engineer at Northwestern Mutual depends on Infrastructure Platforms to build, run, and improve the systems that support our clients, advisors, and enterprise partners. We run the cloud, container, database, integration, observability, and reliability platforms that roughly 1,800 engineers use every day. We are looking for an executive leader to guide this organization through its next chapter: advancing cloud modernization, consolidating infrastructure capabilities, and running enterprise platforms with operational discipline. This is a leadership role for someone who understands the technology deeply, sets clear direction, and builds the operating model that helps teams deliver faster, safer, and with greater consistency.

Requirements

15 or more years in software or infrastructure engineering, including 8 or more years leading engineering organizations.
Experience leading large cloud migrations that is inclusive of application modernization, developer platform consolidation, and infrastructure simplification.
Deep, current expertise in at least one major cloud provider (AWS preferred), container platforms, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability.
A track record of building platforms that other engineering teams depend on, with measurable results in reliability, delivery speed, or cost.
Experience running production operations for a large platform estate, including incident response, on-call programs, post-incident review, and measurable improvements in reliability or restore times.
A track record of managing an engineering organization through metrics, with outcomes you can name and numbers behind them.
Experience managing enterprise vendor agreements and partner performance across cloud, infrastructure, developer tools, or managed-service platforms.
Working fluency in software engineering, architecture, cloud platforms, automation, and operational practices, with the ability to engage senior technical teams and translate technical tradeoffs into business decisions.

Nice To Haves

Experience in financial services or another regulated industry.
Experience introducing AI-assisted development tools to a large engineering organization.
A public record of technical writing, speaking, or open-source contribution.

Responsibilities

Strategy, roadmap, and delivery for Infrastructure Platforms
Executive sponsorship of cloud modernization and platform simplification, including the commercial planning, governance, and operating discipline needed to support enterprise adoption.
Enterprise vendor strategy and commercial governance for cloud, developer experience, infrastructure, and managed-service capabilities, with AWS experience preferred.
Production operations for the platforms, including incident response, problem management, and the reliability program that reduces outages year over year.
Platform reliability, cost, and security posture across the company’s cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
Recruiting, developing, and retaining engineering leaders and senior engineers.
Set and communicate a clear multi-year vision for Infrastructure Platforms and translate it into quarterly outcomes the organization can execute against.
Partner across the technology platform organization to consolidate developer experience platforms so engineers have one paved road for building, testing, and deploying software.
Complete the move to pipeline-first delivery and remove standing production access across the estate.
Guide cloud, infrastructure, developer experience, and managed-service vendor relationships with disciplined demand planning, commercial governance, and outcome-based performance management.
Run production operations for the platforms with a continual reduction in outages as the standing goal: lead major incident response, own the post-incident review process, and turn recurring failure modes into engineering work with named owners and dates.
Define and manage the platform scorecard for the organization, including adoption, reuse, availability, change failure rate, mean time to restore, incident trends, onboarding and provisioning time, unit cost, security and risk posture, developer satisfaction, and delivery cycle time.
Represent Infrastructure Platforms to the CIO, the executive leadership team, and enterprise partners, and represent Northwestern Mutual to the broader engineering community.