[Hiring] Director of Cloud Operations @Firstup

Role Description

We are seeking a Director of Cloud Operations (CloudOps) to lead and evolve our cloud infrastructure and operational practices across a globally distributed SaaS platform. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our systems running across multiple AWS regions in the United States and Europe.

As part of the senior leadership team, you will partner closely with Engineering, Security, and Product to strengthen operational excellence, enhance system observability, and drive continuous improvement in how we build and run services. You will lead a distributed team of engineers across the US and UK, fostering a high-performing, collaborative, and growth-oriented environment. This role is ideal for a leader who combines deep technical expertise with a pragmatic approach to improving systems, processes, and team capabilities.

What You’ll Do

• Cloud Platform & Reliability
  • Own the availability, performance, and resilience of our multi-region AWS platform.
  • Drive improvements in system reliability through well-defined SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and proactive engineering practices.
  • Lead efforts to reduce MTTR and improve incident response effectiveness across the organization.
  • Guide architecture decisions for microservices, Kubernetes (EKS), and serverless workloads to ensure scalability and fault tolerance.
• Observability & Incident Management
  • Advance our observability strategy using Datadog, ensuring actionable insights across infrastructure and applications.
  • Establish and refine incident management practices, including on-call processes, escalation paths, and post-incident reviews.
  • Act as an incident commander for critical events and contribute to the on-call rotation.
• Operational Excellence & Efficiency
  • Elevate operational standards through automation, standardization, and adoption of modern best practices.
  • Drive cost optimization initiatives across AWS environments without compromising performance or reliability.
  • Leverage AI and automation to improve operational efficiency, accelerate root cause analysis, and enhance system insights.
  • Continuously improve CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI) and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform).
• Team Leadership & Development
  • Lead, mentor, and support a distributed team of CloudOps engineers across the US and UK.
  • Foster a culture of accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.
  • Provide technical guidance while enabling the team to grow in ownership and capability.
• Hybrid & Legacy Environment Support
  • Oversee ongoing operations of a legacy .NET-based solution hosted in private data centers in the US and Europe.
  • Ensure stability and support for existing customers while maintaining clear operational boundaries with the cloud platform.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps roles, with recent experience leading CloudOps/SRE teams.
• Proven track record of leading operational or platform transformations in a SaaS environment.
• Experience operating multi-region, customer-facing systems at scale.

Technical Expertise

• Strong hands-on experience with:
  • AWS (multi-region architectures)
  • Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized environments
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
  • CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI or similar)
  • Observability platforms (Datadog or equivalent)
• Solid understanding of microservices and distributed systems design.
• Familiarity with serverless architectures and modern cloud-native patterns.

Operational Leadership

• Deep experience with incident management, on-call operations, and reliability engineering practices.
• Strong understanding of SLO/SLI frameworks, monitoring strategies, and performance optimization.
• Demonstrated ability to balance hands-on technical work with team leadership.

Leadership & Mindset

• Collaborative, pragmatic leader who can influence across teams and functions.
• Passion for building and supporting high-performing teams.
• Focus on continuous improvement, with a bias toward measurable outcomes.

Benefits

• Opportunity to shape and advance the operational foundation of a global SaaS platform.
• Work with modern cloud technologies and a distributed, collaborative team.
• Be a key member of the engineering leadership team with direct impact on reliability, scalability, and customer experience.
• Firstup expects the base salary for this role to be between $200,000-$228,000.
• Excellent PTO program, great health benefits, a casual and friendly environment, remote work.
• Leadership team who truly believes in your growth – both personally and professionally.