Head of Global Infrastructure & Operations

ESTIDAMA UAE; Abu Dhabi; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in the UAE is seeking a Senior Infrastructure and Cloud Architect to lead global operations and cloud strategy. The role involves overseeing high-availability systems and compliance with regulatory frameworks. Ideal candidates will have extensive leadership experience in cloud environments and strong technical expertise in SRE practices.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure or cloud engineering.
• 5+ years in a senior leadership role.
• Expertise in AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute global infrastructure strategy.
• Oversee 24/7 operational management and incident response.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams for feature delivery.

Skills

Infrastructure Engineering

Cloud Strategy

Compliance Management

Incident Management

Stakeholder Management

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD Pipelines

Job description

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and execute the global infrastructure and cloud strategy (AWS/Azure etc).

• Architect scalable, secure, and highly available systems to support real-time communication and data-intensive workloads.

• Oversee deployment, monitoring, disaster recovery, and incident response across all environments.

• Lead and optimize the global Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, and IT operations teams. • 24/7 Operational Management: Oversee round-the-clock monitoring of IT systems and infrastructure, establishing robust on-call protocols and rapid incident response procedures to ensure continuous service availability.

• Develop and maintain disaster recovery, business continuity, and incident response plans, proactively identifying and mitigating risks.

• Own SLAs, uptime, and performance metrics for core services and internal systems. • Implement ITSM best practices (e.g., change, incident, and capacity management).

• Partner with security and privacy teams to ensure infrastructure is compliant (e.g., ISO 27001, GDPR, SOC 2, PCI-DSS). • Ensure secure configurations, patching, and monitoring of infrastructure systems.

• Drive automation across CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure provisioning (IaC), and monitoring/alerting.

• Lead capacity planning and performance tuning efforts for all global infrastructure components.

• Demonstrated understanding of regulatory frameworks and compliance requirements in the financial or crypto sectors.

• Ability to translate compliance requirements into actionable IT policies and operational procedures.

• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Business, Support, Compliance and Legal teams to ensure infrastructure supports feature delivery and business goals.

• Work closely with external partners, ISPs, and vendors for connectivity, CDN, and hosting services. • Proven ability to lead and motivate cross-functional teams in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. • Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical issues to non-technical audiences.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in infrastructure, cloud, or platform engineering, with 5+ years in a senior leadership role.

• Proven experience managing global operations for high-availability, low-latency communication or SaaS platforms.

• Expertise in AWS/GCP/Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and network design.

• Deep understanding of SRE practices, incident management, observability, and service performance.

• Experience with security, compliance, and privacy regulations in a global context.

• Exceptional leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Experience:

• Experience in telecom, communication platforms or financial services providers.

• Familiarity with hybrid-cloud or multi-region deployments.

• Track record of driving cost optimization in cloud spend and infrastructure footprint.

• Experience integrating AI/ML in observability or predictive operations.