Senior Director - Cloud Operations

Ashton North LLC; North Carolina; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Ashton North LLC is seeking a Senior Director of Cloud Operations and DevOps for a global healthcare technology platform. You will lead global Cloud Operations, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams to ensure availability, security, and scalable SaaS delivery.

The role emphasizes AI-driven automation, FinOps, capacity planning, and governance. You will partner across Product, Engineering, Security, Support, and Finance to align technology with business goals and growth, including

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in CS/Engineering/IT; Master’s preferred.
• 12+ years in Cloud Ops, DevOps, SRE, or SaaS operations.
• 7+ years of technology leadership including managing managers and leaders.
• Proven ownership of Cloud Ops/DevOps in customer-facing SaaS or software.
• Experience scaling SaaS environments with growth in customers, users, migrations, or demand.
• Strong knowledge of modern cloud architecture, CI/CD, IaC, observability, incident management, resilience, and capacity planning.
• Experience with AI, intelligent automation, or ML in operations or software delivery.
• Excellent executive communication with cross-functional collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop global Cloud Operations, DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams.
• Own availability, performance, scalability, resilience, security, and operational readiness of customer-facing cloud environments.
• Build proactive operating model to identify capacity constraints, reliability concerns, and risks before impacting customers.
• Advance DevOps practices: CI/CD, IaC, automated testing, observability, release automation, reliability.
• Apply AI and intelligent automation to monitoring, anomaly detection, incident prediction, and capacity forecasting.
• Establish governance, security, privacy, and measurable outcomes for AI-enabled tools and processes.
• Anticipate infrastructure needs based on growth, roadmaps, expansion, migrations.
• Partner with Product, Sales, and Support to plan for future demand and migrations.
• Create scalable onboarding/migration processes for customers to cloud SaaS platforms.
• Own cloud budgets, FinOps, cost optimization, and vendor relationships.
• Lead and develop managers, tech leaders, engineers, and operations professionals in a distributed org.
• Translate strategic tech plans into clear business and financial outcomes.

Skills

Leadership

Cloud Operations

DevOps

SRE

Platform Engineering

AI in Ops

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Observability

Incident Management

Capacity Planning

FinOps

Cost Optimization

Vendor Management

Governance & Security

Executive Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field

Master's Degree preferred

Tools

Snowflake

Azure

AWS

Job description

Senior Director, Cloud Operations and DevOps

Ashton North is working with a global healthcare technology company to identify a Senior Director of Cloud Operations and DevOps.

This leader will oversee the global teams responsible for Cloud Operations, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, and related operational capabilities supporting customer-facing SaaS products.

The Senior Director will be responsible for strengthening scalability, reliability, security, automation, and operational readiness as the company continues growing and moving customers into its cloud environment. This individual will work closely with Product, Engineering, Security, Support, Professional Services, Finance, and other business leaders to anticipate future demand and ensure the organization is prepared for customer growth and planned migrations.

AI will be an important part of this position. The successful candidate will develop practical ways to apply AI and intelligent automation across cloud operations, software delivery, observability, incident management, capacity planning, and operational decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop global Cloud Operations, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and platform engineering teams.
• Own the availability, performance, scalability, resilience, security, and operational readiness of customer-facing cloud environments.
• Build a proactive operating model that identifies capacity constraints, reliability concerns, and operational risks before they affect customers.
• Advance DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, observability, release automation, and modern reliability practices.
• Apply AI and intelligent automation to monitoring, anomaly detection, incident prediction, capacity forecasting, service management, and software delivery.
• Establish appropriate governance, security, privacy, and measurable outcomes for AI-enabled tools and operational processes.
• Anticipate infrastructure and capacity needs based on customer growth, product roadmaps, geographic expansion, and planned cloud migrations.
• Partner with Product, Sales, Professional Services, Support, and customer-facing leaders to understand future demand and prepare the environment before customer needs arrive.
• Create scalable and increasingly automated approaches for onboarding and migrating customers from legacy or on-premises environments into modern SaaS platforms.
• Own cloud infrastructure budgets, capacity investments, financial forecasting, FinOps, cost optimization, and strategic vendor relationships.
• Lead and develop managers, technical leaders, engineers, and operational professionals within a global or distributed organization.
• Translate complex technical strategy into clear business, financial, customer, and operational outcomes.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience. Master's Degree is preferred
• 12 or more years of progressive experience across Cloud Operations, DevOps, infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or SaaS operations.
• At least seven years of technology leadership experience, including experience leading managers and technical leaders.
• Demonstrated ownership of Cloud Operations and DevOps within a customer-facing SaaS or software product company.
• Proven experience scaling SaaS environments through meaningful growth in customers, users, migrations, geographic reach, or product demand.
• Strong working knowledge of modern cloud architecture, DevOps, SRE, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, incident management, resilience, and capacity planning.
• Experience owning significant cloud or infrastructure budgets, FinOps programs, investment planning, cost optimization, and strategic vendor relationships.
• Experience applying AI, machine learning, intelligent automation, or agent-based capabilities to technology operations or software delivery.
• Strong executive communication skills with the ability to work effectively with technical teams, customers, senior executives, and cross-functional business leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Azure and AWS or complex multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments.
• Experience supporting a smaller or mid-sized SaaS company during a significant period of customer and company growth.
• Experience within healthcare technology, laboratory informatics, life sciences, diagnostics, medical technology, or another regulated SaaS environment.
• Experience modernizing legacy platforms and migrating customers from on-premises solutions into cloud-native SaaS environments.
• Experience with AI engineering, intelligent agents, data platforms, Snowflake, modern analytics, or AI-enabled software development practices.

Location and Work Arrangement

The company prefers candidates located in or willing to relocate to the Raleigh, North Carolina area. Remote flexibility may be considered for an exceptional candidate located in the Eastern or Central time zone. Travel will be required based on business, team, and customer needs.