Head of Cloud Platform & Infra (Kubernetes)

Ripple; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 272,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Health & wellness benefits

In-office collaboration

Learning & development budget

Job summary

Ripple is seeking a hands-on engineering leader to guide the teams responsible for cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, and developer experience in a multi-cloud environment. You will own strategic direction, architecture reviews, and performance optimization while mentoring managers and engineers to deliver a secure, scalable platform.

Ideal candidates bring 12+ years of software and infra experience, 5+ years in leadership, and deep Kubernetes, multi-cloud, and IaC expertise.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of hands-on software and infrastructure engineering experience
• 5+ years leading teams and managing managers
• Experience with multi-cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Strong background in IaC and declarative operations
• Proven ability to build highly available, secure distributed systems
• Excellent leadership and communication skills

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical and organizational strategy for multi-cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes platform
• Manage multiple teams and managers across compute platform, cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and reliability engineering
• Define and deliver the multi-year infrastructure roadmap including cluster architecture and CI/CD
• Set operational excellence standards (SLOs, incident response, blameless postmortems)
• Drive multi-cloud strategy, workload placement, disaster recovery, and regional resilience
• Partner with Security and Compliance to meet SOC 2/ISO regulatory requirements without slowing engineering
• Own cloud spend with clear efficiency accountability as the platform scales
• Provide hands-on technical leadership including architecture reviews and incident escalations
• Mentor and grow teams, including managers and ICs
• Align team objectives with business goals and quarterly planning
• Translate infra investments into business-relevant terms for engineers and executives
• Scale organization by hiring exceptional leaders and engineers

Skills

Kubernetes at scale

Multi-cloud

Infrastructure as code

Terraform

Helm

GitOps (Argo CD/Flux)

Service mesh

Observability

Security

Agile leadership

Communication

People management

Education

BS in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Argo CD

Flux

Job description

Ripple is seeking a hands-on engineering leader to guide the teams responsible for cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, and developer experience in a multi-cloud environment. You will own strategic direction, architecture reviews, and performance optimization while mentoring managers and engineers to deliver a secure, scalable platform.

Ideal candidates bring 12+ years of software and infra experience, 5+ years in leadership, and deep Kubernetes, multi-cloud, and IaC expertise.