VP, Operations

Rakuten Kobo Inc.•Toronto, ON

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

As VP of Operations at Kobo, you will lead the teams that keep our products running, our systems secure, and our developers productive. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, you will be a strategic partner in shaping the multi-year technology platform strategy that underpins Kobo's business — from infrastructure and security to the developer experience that increasingly defines how fast and how well we build. You will own Infrastructure, Security & Compliance, Developer Experience & Platform Engineering, and our Corporate IT enablement (delivered in partnership with our Rakuten parent). Your team of ~40 is based primarily in Ontario with a small presence in Germany.

Requirements

A track record of building effective teams — attracting talent and mentoring them to success.
Experience delivering a portfolio of concurrent strategic initiatives in an agile environment while maintaining a high level of service for business-as-usual operations.
Management of a sizeable, diverse team, including remote and distributed members, while optimizing communication and trust across time zones and cultures.
Deep expertise in managing both co-located and cloud infrastructure at scale, including hardware procurement and lifecycle management.
Deep expertise in cloud-native and hybrid cloud infrastructure, including containerization, distributed processing, and high availability.
Experience working with large, multi-team development organizations to facilitate DevOps and SRE practices.
Experience governing a security and compliance practice for an international ecommerce setting — familiarity with Data Loss Prevention, data retention policies, privacy frameworks, and audit methodologies.
Demonstrated ability to own and optimize a meaningful operating budget, finding continuous efficiency without compromising reliability or security.
10+ years of experience in a technology career spanning systems design, production operations, security, and vendor management.
5+ years of management experience with evidence of increasing responsibility in terms of portfolio scope and people.
Excellent communication skills, including outstanding written and spoken English.

Responsibilities

Define and execute a multi-year technology platform strategy in partnership with the CTO — optimizing for development velocity, system performance, security, reliability, and cost effectiveness.
Lead the transformation of the operations model from a ticket-driven organization to a platform team: where most of the broader organization self-serves against a well-designed platform, and your team's time is spent building and managing that platform rather than handling individual requests.
Own Kobo's co-located and cloud infrastructure, including hardware procurement, lifecycle management, and capacity planning.
Meet and exceed production and corporate system SLOs for performance and reliability.
Drive disaster recovery and resilience strategy at organizational and technology levels.
Maintain and govern Kobo's security posture and compliance practice.
Oversee incident response governance and process design.
Maintain practices around Data Loss Prevention, data retention, privacy frameworks, and audit methodologies in an international ecommerce setting.
Elevate developer experience and productivity as a first-class concern — an increasingly strategic mandate given the pace of change in AI-assisted development.
Build the platform, tooling, and paved paths that let engineering teams move faster with less friction, while keeping reliability and security as defaults rather than afterthoughts.
Partner with multi-team development organizations to facilitate DevOps and SRE practices.
Serve as Kobo's primary conduit to Corporate IT, which is delivered through Rakuten. You will not own Corporate IT directly, but you are accountable for ensuring Kobo's staff are well-enabled through it.
Manage a diverse set of partners and vendors to get the best value for investments in tooling, software, and hardware.
Work with Rakuten centers to find areas where Kobo benefits from scale, purchase power, shared understanding, and shared methodologies — achieving synergies and economies where they genuinely exist.