firstup - Director of Cloud Operations
Requirements
• 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 • 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.
Responsibilities
• 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.
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. The starting rate of pay may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, position offered, location, education, training, and/or experience. • Because you care - about people, the work you do, and the connections you make. Work is such a large part of life; it only makes sense to make it awesome. • If you want to engage brilliant minds in a high-growth and inclusive environment where ideas are rewarded regardless of who they come from, join us. This is a rapidly changing space so if you thrive on ambiguity, are hungry for a challenge, and have the guts to speak your mind, you could be a perfect fit. • We offer an excellent PTO program, great health benefits, a casual and friendly environment, remote work, and a leadership team who truly believes in your growth – both personally and professionally.
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