Director, Technical Products and Operations

realchemistry; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

realchemistry is seeking a Director-level technical leader to own a flagship client-facing SaaS platform. You will blend hands-on engineering with people leadership, spanning AWS infrastructure, security, and the operational reliability that commercial clients depend on.

You will architect and ship, mentor an external platform engineering function, and drive SOC 2 readiness, IAM governance, and AI feature rollout with governance and cost controls.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in IT, platform engineering, or cloud operations.
• 3+ years running production workloads on AWS.
• Led DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering teams, including external/vendor partners.
• Knowledge of SOC 2 controls and cloud security best practices (secrets management, logging).

Responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle of AWS-hosted SaaS products, including architecture, deployment, environment separation, IaC with Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and FinOps-driven cost/performance tuning.
• Design high-availability and disaster-recovery patterns with backups, failover, and runbooks.
• Drive SOC 2 readiness and control maturity with auditors toward Type II.
• Enforce least-privilege IAM, encryption, secrets management, audit logging, vulnerability remediation, and third-party pen tests coordination.
• Operationalize AI/LLM features with governance, data classification, DLP, and cost controls.
• Lead incident response, own SLAs, on-call coverage, change/release governance, and post-incident reviews; communicate platform health to executives.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

AWS hands-on

Tools

Terraform

CI/CD

IAM

Job description

Role overview

A global healthcare communications agency is hiring a Director-level technical leader to take end-to-end ownership of its flagship client-facing SaaS platform. The role blends deep hands-on engineering with people leadership, covering AWS infrastructure, security and compliance, and the operational reliability that commercial clients depend on. It suits a practitioner who still architects and ships, while mentoring an external platform engineering function.

Responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle of AWS-hosted SaaS products, including architecture, deployment, environment separation, IaC with Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and FinOps-driven cost and performance tuning.
• Design and maintain high-availability and disaster-recovery patterns—backups, failover, recovery runbooks—aligned with contractual uptime commitments.
• Drive SOC 2 readiness and ongoing control maturity, partnering with Information Security and external auditors on Type I attestation and progression toward Type II.
• Enforce least-privilege IAM, encryption, secrets management, audit logging, vulnerability remediation, and coordination of third-party penetration tests.
• Operationalize AI and LLM-enabled features safely, with approved providers, data classification, DLP, cost guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls where appropriate.
• Run incident response as senior escalation, own SLAs, on-call coverage, change management, release governance, and post-incident reviews, while communicating platform health to executive stakeholders.

Requirements

• 7+ years in IT, platform engineering, or cloud operations, including 3+ years running production workloads on AWS (compute, networking, databases, IAM, IaC).
• Hands-on practitioner background who has personally implemented and operated a product on AWS, not solely managed others doing the work.
• Prior leadership of DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering teams, ideally including external or vendor partners.
• Working knowledge of SOC 2 controls and practical implementation of cloud security best practices, including secrets management and tamper-evident logging.
• Demonstrated ownership of production reliability: SLAs, incident response, on-call, and HA/DR design.
• Strong communicator comfortable translating technical detail for engineering teams and C-suite stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Experience delivering a multi-tenant, externally sold commercial SaaS product.
• Familiarity with regulated environments such as HIPAA or GDPR, and with pharmaceutical or biotech client data handling expectations.
• Track record productionizing AI or LLM features with usage governance and cost controls.

Benefits and work setup

• Hybrid model with two in-office days per week for employees within roughly one hour of an office; remote options discussed case by case.
• Global team with periodic in-person collaboration, culture, and learning events.
• Equal opportunity employer with accommodations available throughout the interview process.