Senior Director, Cloud Platforms

Clear Destination Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Magnit seeks a Senior Director, Cloud Platforms to own the migration from on‑prem to public cloud and to build the cloud platform used by engineering. You will set strategy and work hands-on with code, pipelines, and Kubernetes manifests, owning exit roadmaps, landing zones, and a paved‑road developer platform.

You will lead cross‑functional teams across Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Operations to move to an API‑first, cloud‑native architecture while improving reliability, security

Qualifications

• Minimum 12+ years in cloud/infrastructure roles
• Proven track record migrating on-prem to public cloud
• Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes and GitOps
• Experience leading a large engineering organization

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end migration roadmap from on-prem to public cloud
• Design secure multi-account cloud foundations
• Deliver internal developer platform with reusable templates
• Drive platform adoption and developer experience metrics
• Lead platform and security posture improvements

Skills

Leadership experience

Cloud strategy

Strategic thinking

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

GitLab

Argo CD

EKS

Terraform

Job description

About the Role

The Senior Director, Cloud Platforms will own Magnit's migration from on-premise infrastructure into the public cloud and build the cloud platform that our engineering organization runs on. This is a hands‑on leadership role: you will set the strategy, then work shoulder‑to‑shoulder with your teams in the code, the pipelines, and the Kubernetes manifests. You will own the data center exit roadmap, the AWS‑first landing zones underneath it, and the paved‑road developer platform (GitLab CI/CD, Argo CD, EKS, Terraform) that makes doing the right thing the easy thing for product teams. Reporting to the Chief Information Officer, you will partner across Engineering, Security, Data, and Operations to move Magnit to an API‑first, cloud‑native architecture while improving reliability, security posture, and unit economics along the way.

What You Will Do

Cloud Migration & Data Center Exit

• Own the end‑to‑end on‑premise to public cloud migration roadmap — wave planning, sequencing, readiness validation, cutover, and stabilization — with clear milestones, exit criteria, and success metrics.

• Lead application portfolio assessment and disposition (rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, retain), building the business case and target architecture for each wave.

• Design and operate secure, multi‑account cloud foundations: landing zones, identity, networking, compute, storage, and Kubernetes.

• Act as the integration layer across infrastructure, application engineering, security, networking, finance, and vendor partners to keep migration waves on schedule and de‑risked.

• Retire on‑premise footprint on a committed timeline, and report progress, risk, and dependencies to executive leadership in plain business terms.

Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

• Run the cloud platform as an internal product with product teams as its customers — not as a ticket queue.

• Deliver golden paths for service creation, CI/CD, secrets, observability, and security through reusable templates, modules, and self‑service tooling, with sensible escape hatches for teams with genuine edge cases.

• Own GitLab‑based source control and CI/CD standards, Kubernetes manifests, and GitOps delivery via Argo CD.

• Drive infrastructure as code and policy as code as the only way infrastructure changes, eliminating manual configuration and drift.

• Advance containerized microservices and serverless patterns on AWS (EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, Secrets Manager, ALB/NLB) as the default for new standalone services.

• Measure and improve developer experience using DORA metrics, time‑to‑first‑deploy, platform adoption, and direct developer feedback.

• Partner with the enterprise workflow effort to shift manual, human‑in‑the‑loop processes to software‑defined workflows (Temporal), removing people from steps that do not need them.

Reliability, Observability & Operations

• Establish the SRE charter: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident response, blameless postmortems, and disaster recovery with tested RTO/RPO targets.

• Consolidate fragmented monitoring into a unified observability platform across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting, standardizing instrumentation on OpenTelemetry and structured logging.

• Lead observability platform direction and rationalization (New Relic as the strategic direction alongside existing Datadog usage), including agent fleet management, telemetry governance, and cost control.

• Move the organization from reactive monitoring to proactive, data‑driven observability across business uptime, engineering excellence, and digital experience, with dashboards that serve both engineers and executives.

• Drive down MTTD and MTTR, and tie reliability goals directly to customer experience and customer experience and business KPIs.

Security, Networking & Resilience

• Embed security and compliance by design: least‑privilege IAM, secrets management, encryption in transit and at rest, and continuous control monitoring.

• Own cloud network architecture end to end — VPC design, segmentation, transit connectivity, private link patterns, DNS, and native load balancing (ALB/NLB).

• Operate edge protection with Cloudflare for WAF, DDoS mitigation, bot management, and DNS, in partnership with the security organization.

• Integrate enterprise identity into platform access patterns (Okta for external user authentication, Microsoft Entra for internal).

• Partner with the CISO organization on cloud security posture, audit readiness, and operational risk management.

FinOps & Vendor Management

• Establish cloud cost transparency, tagging discipline, showback/chargeback, and forecasting the business can trust.

• Build unit economics (cost per workload, per environment, per client) and run a standing optimization backlog that lowers total cost of ownership as consumption grows.

• Manage cloud, observability, and tooling vendor relationships, contracts, commitments, and renewals.

Leadership & Influence

• Build, lead, and develop a high‑performing global organization spanning cloud engineering, platform engineering, SRE, and network engineering.

• Set the engineering bar through architecture review, code review, and hands‑on participation — credibility at this level comes from doing the work, not describing it.

• Define clear ownership boundaries between platform and product teams, and the engagement model for prioritization, funding, and decision‑making.

• Translate complex technical trade‑offs for technical, non‑technical, and executive audiences, including CIO and CDTO staff.

• Champion adoption of AI‑assisted engineering and AI‑driven operations, and ensure the platform supports enterprise AI, GenAI, and analytics workloads.

What You Will Need

• 12+ years of progressive experience in cloud, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 5 years leading engineers and engineering managers.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field required; advanced degree preferred, equivalent professional experience considered.

• Demonstrated success leading a large‑scale on‑premise to public cloud migration or data center exit in a complex, matrixed organization — owned it, not adjacent to it.

• Proven experience building or operating an internal developer platform at scale, with real adoption to show for it.

• Genuinely hands‑on: you can still read and write the Terraform, the pipeline config, and the Kubernetes manifests — and in this role you will.

• Deep expertise in Kubernetes (EKS strongly preferred) and GitOps delivery patterns.

• Strong cloud networking depth — VPC architecture, segmentation, native load balancing, DNS, and hybrid connectivity.

• Experience with cloud security and edge protection, including WAF and DDoS prevention.

• Track record of driving adoption and non‑trivial organizational change, with comfort operating in ambiguity.

• Ability to convey complex technical information to technical, non‑technical, and executive audiences.

• Preferred tech stack experience includes:

• Cloud: AWS‑first (not AWS‑only); Azure for internal IT and Power BI workloads

• Containers & Orchestration: Kubernetes/EKS, Argo CD, Helm, serverless patterns (Lambda)

• CI/CD & IaC: GitLab source control and CI/CD, Terraform, policy as code

• AWS Services: DynamoDB, Secrets Manager, ALB/NLB, IAM, S3, CloudWatch

• Networking & Edge: Cloudflare (WAF, DDoS, DNS), VPC design, transit and private connectivity

• Data: PostgreSQL (relational standard), Snowflake (enterprise data warehouse), Power BI

• Observability: New Relic, Datadog, OpenTelemetry

• Workflow & Integration: Temporal, API‑first service design, ServiceNow

• Identity: Okta (external), Microsoft Entra (internal)

• Languages: Python primary; polyglot where the use case warrants.

Compensation: Salary range is $220,000-$230,000 USD annually.

Salary rates are based on experience, skills, and geographic location.