Director, Cloud Engineering

The Blue Venture Fund; Oak Brook (IL); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

The Blue Venture Fund seeks a Director of Cloud Engineering to own strategy, architecture, and operational excellence for its multi-cloud platform (GCP and Azure). You will lead a distributed team of cloud engineers, SREs, and platform engineers, partnering with product, security, and data teams to deliver reliable, secure, and cost-efficient infrastructure.

This hands-on leadership role balances technical credibility with strategic influence, sets governance, drives IaC and CI/CD, optimizes

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-cloud architecture strategy across GCP and Azure.
• Own IaC standards and GitOps-enabled CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead SRE practices and reliability improvements with SLO/SLI tracking.
• Oversee cloud security baselines, CSPM, and compliance.
• Drive FinOps practices, cost visibility, and vendor negotiations.
• Champion AI-enabled tooling and responsible AI adoption.
• Develop leadership, hiring, and career ladders for the team.

Skills

Cloud architecture

Technical leadership

Distributed team leadership

SRE practices

FinOps

Tools

Kubernetes

GKE

AKS

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

The Director of Cloud Engineering is a senior engineering leader accountable for the strategy, architecture, and operational excellence of the company's multi-cloud platform. Reporting to the Sr. Director of IT Operations, this role owns the end-to-end cloud estate across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure, setting the technical direction for cloud-native infrastructure, platform engineering, and developer experience.

You will build and lead a high-performing distributed team of cloud engineers, SREs, and platform engineers while partnering closely with product, security, data, and application engineering to deliver a reliable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud foundation. This is a hands-on leadership role that balances deep technical credibility with the strategic thinking and organizational influence expected at the Director level.

Key Responsibilities:

Cloud Platform Strategy & Architecture

• Define and own the multi-cloud architecture strategy across GCP and Azure, aligning platform capabilities with business objectives, scalability requirements, and total cost of ownership targets.
• Lead architectural decisions for cloud-native workloads, including microservices, containerization (Kubernetes/GKE/AKS), serverless functions, and event-driven patterns.
• Drive the evolution of the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), enabling self-service infrastructure provisioning, golden-path templates, and standardized deployment pipelines.
• Establish and enforce cloud governance frameworks, including resource hierarchy, landing zones, policy-as-code, and guardrails across both cloud providers.
• Evaluate emerging technologies—AI/ML infrastructure, LLMOps tooling, edge compute—and make build-vs-buy recommendations grounded in cost, risk, and strategic fit.

Infrastructure Engineering & Operations

• Own Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and practices; ensure all infrastructure changes flow through version-controlled, peer-reviewed pipelines.
• Oversee GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipeline infrastructure, partnering with application teams to reduce deployment lead time and increase release frequency.
• Direct SRE practices across the cloud estate: define and track SLIs/SLOs, drive blameless post-mortems, and lead reliability improvements through systematic error-budget management.
• Own observability strategy—logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting—across cloud environments, ensuring engineers have actionable insight into system health and performance.
• Lead disaster recovery design, runbook development, and regular DR/BCP testing exercises; drive remediation of identified gaps to closure.
• Administer and maintain all Microsoft licensing through NCE and MPSA agreements
• Maintain network architecture and connectivity across cloud environments, data centers, and supported locations, including VPN, private connectivity (Interconnect/ExpressRoute), and DNS.

Security, Compliance & Risk

• Partner with the Security team to implement Zero Trust network architecture, enforce least-privilege IAM, and operationalize Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tooling.
• Ensure cloud environments meet regulatory and compliance requirements; support internal and external audits by providing architecture documentation, access logs, and control evidence.
• Define and maintain cloud security baselines, secrets management practices, and data encryption standards across the shared responsibility model.
• Drive incident response processes for cloud infrastructure events, ensuring timely escalation, containment, and root-cause resolution.

FinOps & Cloud Cost Management

• Own the cloud infrastructure budget; implement FinOps practices including cost allocation tagging, chargeback/showback reporting, reserved capacity planning, and rightsizing recommendations.
• Establish cloud cost visibility and governance mechanisms so engineering teams can make cost-aware architecture decisions in real time.
• Negotiate vendor agreements and manage strategic relationships with GCP, Azure, and key third-party tooling providers.

AI-Enabled Cloud Engineering

Evaluate, integrate, and champion the responsible use of AI tools across cloud engineering and platform teams, setting standards for AI-driven productivity and innovation.

Treat AI as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement — ensuring engineers maintain sound engineering judgment and that AI-generated code and configuration meet the same quality, security, and reliability standards as hand-written work.

Leadership & People Management

• Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of cloud engineers, platform engineers, and SREs (onshore and offshore); establish clear career ladders and development paths.
• Build a team culture grounded in psychological safety, continuous learning, and engineering excellence; champion internal tech talks, documentation habits, and knowledge sharing.
• Manage headcount planning, recruiting, and onboarding; partner with HR and technical leads to define roles and evaluate candidates.
• Deliver timely, constructive performance reviews; proactively manage performance issues and recognize high-impact contributions.
• Serve as a technical escalation path and executive sponsor for major infrastructure initiatives; represent the cloud engineering team in IT governance and steering forums.