PlayOn! Sports - VP, Cloud Operations

• Serve as a core member of the technology leadership team, translating business goals into a unified cloud infrastructure and reliability strategy • Stand up a single Cloud Infrastructure organization out of today’s separate Cloud Engineering, SRE, and DevOps functions, defining team structure, on-call rotations, and escalation paths • Own cloud architecture strategy across PlayOn’s AWS accounts and regions, ensuring the platform scales cleanly for NFHS Network, GoFan, MaxPreps, and PlayOn HQ • Define, instrument, and track SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for critical services, and own the incident command process for major incidents • Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and a self-service internal developer platform that gives product engineering teams golden paths for provisioning and deployment • Own CI/CD strategy and deployment standards in partnership with Software Engineering leadership, improving deployment frequency and change failure rate • Lead a FinOps program covering cost visibility, showback/chargeback, reserved capacity planning, and budget forecasting across the AWS footprint • Own the observability stack (New Relic, CloudWatch, and related tooling), driving a shift from reactive firefighting to proactive monitoring and alerting • Own capacity planning for major sporting event surges — playoffs, championships, and other high-traffic moments — ensuring zero-downtime scaling • Recruit, mentor, and lead a team of cloud engineering, SRE, and DevOps managers and senior engineers, building a strong culture of ownership and operational rigor • Define and monitor KPIs for infrastructure performance (e.g., uptime, deployment frequency, MTTR, cloud cost efficiency), reporting regularly to the CTO and executive team • Partner with Security, Product, and Data Engineering leadership to balance velocity, reliability, and cost across every major platform decision • 10+ years of infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering experience, including 5+ years in senior leadership managing managers • A proven track record leading the consolidation or scaling of Cloud Engineering, SRE, and DevOps functions into a single, high-performing organization • Deep, hands-on expertise running production workloads on AWS at scale across multiple accounts and regions • Strong experience owning SLOs, error budgets, incident management, and on-call programs for high-traffic, real-time systems (live video or streaming infrastructure a strong plus) • Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS), and modern CI/CD tooling • Demonstrated success building or running a FinOps practice with measurable cloud cost optimization results • Experience with observability and monitoring platforms (New Relic, CloudWatch, Datadog, or similar) and modern logging and alerting pipelines • Solid understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, network segmentation, and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 and PCI DSS • Excellent executive communication skills, with experience presenting infrastructure strategy, risk, and investment tradeoffs to the CTO and executive team • Demonstrated ability to scale infrastructure teams in a high-growth, fast-paced, consumer platform environment • Strong business acumen, with experience owning budgets, vendor negotiations, and staffing and workforce planning • Education: BS in Computer Science or a related field. MS preferred • How You Play • Ownership over Participation - You take responsibility for achieving holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, and adapt quickly when situations require a different approach. You follow through even against the toughest challenges. • Ownership over Participation • Team over Stars - You are a bridge builder, establishing processes and relationships with teams outside your own. You work to rally around common goals, find win-win solutions, compromise when necessary, and help others succeed. • Team over Stars • Growth over Comfort - You are driven by a desire to grow and actively seek opportunities to expand your comfort zone, skills, and confidence. You embrace new challenges with curiosity, accepting discomfort and failure as opportunities to learn. • Growth over Comfort • Fairness over Popularity - You approach decisions with a scientist’s mindset, challenging your assumptions and remaining objective. You consider long-term impact rather than relying on short-term gains, proactively seek others’ perspectives, and manage emotions in decision-making. • Fairness over Popularity • PlayOn is where high school sports come to life. Through GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps, we give every fan a front-row seat to the moments that matter most: the buzzer-beaters, the comeback wins, the senior nights, the rivalries that define a town. • We built our technology for the people who live and breathe high school athletics — the parents who never miss a game, the alumni still cheering from across the country, the communities that show up week after week. From buying tickets to watching a live stream to reliving the highlights, we make it simple to stay close to the sports and the athletes you love most. • Backed by KKR, we build the technology that powers high school athletics from the inside out: Schools trust us to handle ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, merchandise, and more so the people running programs can stay focused on the athletes and fans we all serve together. • We're a growth-stage company on a mission to make high school sports more accessible, more memorable, and more connected than ever before. • When being there means everything, we make sure you never miss a moment.