[Hiring] Director, Cloud Infrastructure @Convene

Role Description

We're hiring a Director of Cloud Infrastructure to join Convene Hospitality Group's (CHG) Technology organization. It's a hands-on role with an AI-native mindset. There are no direct reports today. You’ll lead through the platform, redesigning how we deploy and setting the standards our product and corporate engineering teams build on. You'll also run the cloud, AI, and venue infrastructure under our portfolio of brands, from client-facing experiences to the systems that keep our nearly 40 venues running. This is a rebuild. You design it and you build it.

Today, deployments are manual and happen about once a sprint. That's the starting line. You'll rethink how we ship so that deployments are unlocked, safe, secure, and governed. You'll have high autonomy and real decision-making power over the tools we use and how we build. We're committed to AWS and will build deeply on it. Most of what sits on top is fair game: CI tooling, pipeline design, orchestration patterns, and source control.

A decision like Bitbucket versus GitHub is a live call, and it's yours to make. Legacy migration follows the decisions. You make the call, then you do the move. This role will have a lot of influence. This is a wide seat. You’ll work across product and corporate engineering, and you’re a big part of how we get to AI-first, spec-driven development.

What You’ll Do:

• Rebuild the deployment path.
• Own CI/CD end to end: build, release, and rollback. Take us from manual deploys to an automated path.
• Make it safe, secure and governed.
• Access control, audit trails, secrets management, environment separation, and a rollback path any engineer can execute.
• Make the platform calls.
• Source control, CI tooling, orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code patterns. Jenkins is what we run today; what we run next is up to you. Decide, document the trade-off, then go forth and migrate.
• Run the AI gateway.
• Build and operate the layer between our engineers, agents and the models they call: provider routing, key management, rate limits, token metering, and usage logging. Every AI call should be visible, governed, and attributable.
• Enable AI-first, spec-driven development.
• Build the environments, pipelines and guardrails that let engineers and agents ship with confidence: ephemeral environments, fast feedback, and automated verification.
• Model and manage cloud and AI cost.
• Forecast what AI systems will cost before we commit and give Finance numbers they can plan against. Keep a standing view of where cloud spend goes and why, and partner with teams to help keep it in check.
• Support in-venue networking applications.
• Each venue relies on network infrastructure for access control, connectivity, and on-site A/V and production. You’ll give our networking team the visibility to monitor and support the applications that keep those venues running.
• Build the observability layer.
• Logging, metrics, alerting, and routing on our Loki/Grafana stack, so every failure reaches a named owner.
• Spread what you know and what you do.
• Coordinate with the product engineers and ensure a level of backup: documented runbooks, a named second operator on every critical path, and dissemination of knowledge and function across product and corporate engineering. Within six months, you can take two weeks off and we can trudge through an emergency without interrupting you.

Qualifications

• You have 9+ years of experience building and running production cloud infrastructure.
• You're deep on AWS: multi-account structure, networking, IAM, and container orchestration on EKS and/or ECS. You've operated production workloads through incidents, upgrades, and growth.
• You're fluent in infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent) and treat infrastructure changes with the same rigor as application code: reviewed, versioned, reproducible.
• You've built or rebuilt a CI/CD pipeline that teams actually use. You know what it takes to move an organization from manual deploys to automated ones, including the trust and process work that comes with it.
• You think about security and governance as design inputs rather than a review gate. Secrets, least privilege, audit trails, environment isolation, and who is allowed to push what, where.
• You’ve run AI systems in production, from the gateway layer (access control, provider routing, cost attribution, observability) to LLM-backed features, including their evaluation, monitoring, and versioning. Experience with MLOps is a plus as our needs grow.
• You can estimate cost and defend the number. You've modeled the spend of an architecture before it was built and adjusted the design when it didn't hold up.
• You're high agency. You set direction without waiting for a spec, make platform decisions with real consequences, and then own the migration. You hold positions firmly, change them on evidence, and leave behind a written trail.
• You’re a problem solver. Application and data teams seek you out for collaboration on architecture, debugging, and trade-off analysis.
• You work in the open and hand things off deliberately. You write the runbook, train the second operator, and measure your success partly by how little depends on you being reachable.
• You explain decisions, risks and trade-offs clearly to engineers, non-engineers, and executives. You make teammates better through code review, pairing, and mentoring.
• You use AI agents for real multi-step work beyond autocomplete, and you verify what they produce against the real system.

Compensation

The above job definition information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job. Job duties and responsibilities are subject to change based on changing business needs and conditions.

• Base Salary Range: $180,000 – $220,000
• Total Target Compensation: $198,000 – $242,000 (includes base salary + annual incentive performance bonus)

Benefits

• Day-one health coverage for you and your family, 24/7 virtual care, emotional well-being support, and fertility & family planning benefits.
• Generous PTO, your birthday off, paid parental leave, and a year-end holiday closure to recharge.
• 401K with company match and support for education, courses, and certifications.
• Ongoing career growth opportunities plus recognition programs to celebrate milestones.
• Volunteer and give-back opportunities, and the chance to make a real impact in the work you do.