Director, Technical Products and Operations

realchemistry; United States; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model with in-office days

Global team collaboration

Job summary

realchemistry is seeking a Director-level technical leader to own an AWS-hosted SaaS platform, blending hands-on engineering with people leadership. You will shape architecture, automation, security, and reliability while mentoring an external platform team.

You’ll drive SOC 2 readiness, implement IAM, encryption, and cost-aware operations, and communicate platform health to the C-suite. Hybrid work in the US with occasional travel.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in IT, platform engineering, or cloud operations
• 3+ years running production workloads on AWS
• Hands-on practitioner who has implemented and operated a product on AWS
• Prior leadership of DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering teams (including external/vendor partners)
• Working knowledge of SOC 2 controls and cloud security best practices
• Ownership of production reliability: SLAs, incident response, on-call, HA/DR design

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
• Drive SOC 2 readiness and progression toward Type II
• Enforce least-privilege IAM, encryption, secrets management, audit logging, vulnerability remediation, and third-party penetration tests
• Operationalize AI and LLM-enabled features with governance, data classification, DLP, cost guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls
• Run incident response as senior escalation, own SLAs, on-call coverage, change management, release governance, and post-incident reviews, communicating platform health to execs

Skills

Leadership

Cloud architecture

Incident response

Security controls

Cross-functional collaboration

Communicating to executives

Tools

Terraform

AWS

CI/CD

SOC 2 controls implementation

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.