Senior Director, Cloud Operations & DevOps

Senior Director Cloud Operations and DevOps

Ashton North Executive Search

About Our Client

Ashton North is partnering with a global healthcare SaaS company to identify a Senior Director of Cloud Operations and DevOps. Our client provides intelligent diagnostic informatics solutions that help healthcare, life sciences, and public health organizations improve workflows, generate meaningful insights, and support healthier and safer communities. The company combines the reach and stability of a global organization with the focus and agility of a specialized software business.

Position Summary

The Senior Director of Cloud Operations and DevOps will lead the global teams responsible for the performance, scalability, reliability, security, and continuous modernization of our client's cloud infrastructure and SaaS delivery environment. This leader will oversee Cloud Operations, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, and related operational capabilities.

This role requires a strong combination of technical credibility, organizational leadership, and business judgment. The Senior Director will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Security, Support, Services, Finance, and customer facing teams to anticipate demand, prepare the environment for customer migrations and growth, and improve reliability and customer experience as the business scales.

AI is a meaningful part of this position. The successful candidate will be expected to move beyond isolated experiments and apply AI responsibly across cloud operations, software delivery, observability, incident management, capacity planning, automation, and operational decision making. Deep Cloud Operations and DevOps leadership remains essential, with AI used to strengthen and accelerate those capabilities.

Location and Work Arrangement

Our client has a preference for candidates located in or willing to relocate to the Raleigh, North Carolina area. Remote flexibility may be considered for an exceptional candidate located in the Eastern or Central time zone. Travel will be required based on business, team, and customer needs.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Operations and Reliability

Lead the global Cloud Operations, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and platform engineering functions supporting customer facing SaaS products.

Own platform availability, performance, scalability, resilience, security, and operational readiness across cloud environments.

Establish and continuously improve service level objectives, reliability measures, operational standards, incident practices, and governance frameworks.

Strengthen observability, monitoring, alerting, root cause analysis, problem management, business continuity, and disaster recovery capabilities.

Build a proactive operating model that identifies risk, capacity constraints, and reliability concerns before they affect customers.

DevOps Platform Engineering and Automation

Advance enterprise DevOps and platform engineering practices that improve deployment speed, consistency, quality, and developer experience.

Drive adoption and maturity of continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, automated testing, release automation, and modern reliability engineering practices.

Create reusable platforms, toolchains, guardrails, and standards that reduce duplication while enabling Product and Engineering teams to deliver efficiently.

Partner with Engineering and Product leaders to modernize legacy environments and accelerate movement toward scalable cloud native architectures.

AI Enabled Operations

Develop and execute a practical roadmap for AI enabled Cloud Operations and DevOps, aligned with the company's broader AI first strategy.

Apply AI and intelligent automation to observability, anomaly detection, incident prediction, self healing workflows, capacity forecasting, service management, and operational analytics.

Evaluate and implement AI enabled capabilities across the software delivery lifecycle, including requirements, architecture, development, testing, validation, deployment, and support.

Establish appropriate governance, security, privacy, human oversight, and measurable business outcomes for AI enabled operational tools and agents.

Build AI fluency within the organization by helping leaders and technical teams adopt new tools responsibly and incorporate them into everyday workflows.

SaaS Growth Customer Migration and Capacity Planning

Anticipate infrastructure and operational needs based on customer growth, product roadmaps, geographic expansion, and planned cloud migrations.

Partner with Product, Sales, Services, Support, and customer facing leaders to understand future demand and ensure the environment is ready before customer needs arrive.

Create repeatable and increasingly automated approaches for onboarding and migrating customers from legacy or on premises environments to modern SaaS platforms.

Scale the environment while maintaining or improving reliability, customer satisfaction, data protection, and operational efficiency.

Financial Vendor and Cloud Strategy

Own cloud infrastructure and operational budgets, forecasting, capacity investment, and cost optimization programs.

Improve cloud unit economics without limiting growth, security, performance, or reliability.

Lead FinOps practices that provide visibility, accountability, and informed decision making across cloud consumption and technology investments.

Manage strategic relationships with cloud providers, technology partners, and third party service providers, including commercial negotiations and performance governance.

Leadership and Organizational Development

Lead and develop a global organization of managers, technical leaders, engineers, and operational professionals.

Create clear accountability, operating rhythms, performance expectations, and succession plans across the organization.

Assess organizational capabilities and make thoughtful decisions regarding structure, talent, leadership development, and resource allocation.

Translate complex technical strategy into clear business, financial, customer, and operational outcomes for executive and nontechnical audiences.

Security Risk and Compliance

Partner with Security, Privacy, Quality, and Compliance teams to ensure cloud environments meet applicable healthcare, data protection, and regulatory requirements.

Embed security, privacy, auditability, and compliance into cloud architecture, DevOps practices, AI enabled workflows, and operational processes.

Govern operational risk and resilience programs across global cloud services and customer environments.

Required Experience and Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.

12 or more years of progressive experience across Cloud Operations, DevOps, infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or SaaS operations.

At least 7 years leading technology teams, including experience leading managers and technical leaders in a global or distributed environment.

Demonstrated ownership of Cloud Operations and DevOps within a customer facing SaaS or software product company.

Proven experience scaling SaaS environments through meaningful growth in customers, users, migrations, geographic reach, or product demand while maintaining or improving reliability and customer satisfaction.

Strong working knowledge of modern cloud architecture, DevOps, SRE, infrastructure as code, continuous delivery, observability, incident management, resilience, and capacity planning.

Experience applying AI, machine learning, intelligent automation, or agent based capabilities to technology operations or software delivery, with the ability to explain the business value and governance considerations.

Experience owning significant cloud or infrastructure budgets, FinOps programs, investment planning, cost optimization, and strategic vendor relationships.

Ability to communicate effectively with technical teams, senior executives, customers, and cross functional business leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Azure and AWS or with complex multi cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Experience supporting a smaller or mid sized SaaS business through a meaningful period of customer and company growth.

Experience in healthcare, laboratory informatics, life sciences, diagnostics, medical technology, or another highly regulated SaaS environment.

Experience modernizing legacy products and migrating customers from on premises platforms to cloud native SaaS environments.

Experience with data platforms, Snowflake, modern analytics, AI engineering, knowledge retrieval, intelligent agents, or AI enabled software development practices.

Master's degree in a technical or business discipline and relevant cloud or technology certifications.

What Success Looks Like

Cloud environments scale ahead of customer demand and planned migrations.

Reliability, availability, resilience, and customer experience improve as the SaaS business grows.

DevOps and platform engineering capabilities increase delivery speed while strengthening quality, security, and governance.

AI enabled operations produce measurable gains in prediction, automation, response time, efficiency, and decision making.

Cloud investments and vendor relationships support growth while improving transparency and unit economics.

The organization develops stronger leaders, clearer accountability, and a more proactive operating culture.

Why Join Our Client

Our client offers a business casual environment, generous paid time off, flexible work schedules, and the opportunity to contribute to a mission driven organization supporting healthcare and diagnostic communities. The company emphasizes training, development, internal mobility, and cross functional collaboration to support continued professional growth.

Commitment to Equal Opportunity

Our client is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, genetic factors, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

General Guidance

This job description describes the responsibilities and qualifications most often associated with this role. Our client may change, reassign, expand, or reduce responsibilities based on evolving business needs.