Director of Cloud Operations

Role Overview

You will lead and evolve Firstup’s cloud infrastructure and operational practices for a globally distributed SaaS platform. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on reliability, scalability, and efficiency across multiple AWS regions in the US and Europe.

Key Missions

• Lead cloud infrastructure and CloudOps/SRE operational practices across a global SaaS environment.
• Improve system reliability using SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and proactive engineering practices.
• Reduce MTTR and strengthen incident response effectiveness.
• Enhance operational excellence through better observability and continuous improvement in how services are built and run.
• Lead and mentor a distributed engineering team across the US and UK, fostering a high-performing, collaborative, growth-oriented culture.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Engineering, Security, and Product to strengthen operational excellence.
• Drive reliability engineering practices across services, including incident management and on-call operations.
• Balance deep technical work with leadership, guidance, and mentoring.

Requirements

• 10+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps, including recent experience leading CloudOps/SRE teams.
• Proven ability to lead operational/platform transformations in a SaaS environment.
• Experience operating multi-region, customer-facing systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of microservices and distributed systems design.
• Infrastructure as Code (preferred: Terraform).
• CI/CD pipeline experience (e.g., CircleCI or similar).
• Hands-on experience with:
  • AWS multi-region architectures
  • Serverless and modern cloud-native patterns
  • Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized environments
  • Observability platforms (e.g., Datadog)
  • SLO/SLI frameworks, monitoring strategies, and performance optimization
• Deep experience with incident management, on-call operations, and reliability engineering.
• Ability to influence across teams and functions with a pragmatic, measurable-outcomes mindset.

Nice to Have

• Additional experience with modern observability and performance optimization tooling beyond Datadog-equivalents.