Senior Program Manager - Cloud Operations

Rippling, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Bespin Global is seeking a Senior Program Manager for Cloud Operations to align leadership strategy with delivery teams, identify operational friction, and drive cross-functional programs that improve reliability and efficiency.

You will own the program roadmap, coordinate with application, security, and infrastructure stakeholders, and report progress to executives. This role emphasizes governance, automation, and DevOps practices within a fast-growing global cloud services organization.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of program or project management across cross-functional tech programs.
• Experience supporting or working with infrastructure, cloud, or IT operations teams.
• Working fluency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Hands-on Agile/Scrum experience with product owners and scrum masters.
• Proven track record leading process improvement initiatives with measurable outcomes.
• Experience with ITSM tooling (ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or equivalent).
• Strong executive communication skills, able to move between technical depth and leadership summaries.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain a prioritized Cloud Operations program roadmap aligned with business objectives, capacity, and risk.
• Facilitate intake and prioritization across competing demands from application teams, security, compliance, and infrastructure stakeholders.
• Maintain a single view of in-flight and upcoming work with clear ownership, dependencies, and target dates.
• Escalate and resolve priority conflicts; make trade-offs explicit.
• Translate complex requirements into actionable cloud transformation roadmaps and guidance.
• Lead end-to-end process improvements across incident, change, request, escalation, and on-call workflows.
• Champion automation opportunities to reduce manual toil and shorten response times.
• Drive DevOps best practices and adoption of CI/CD pipelines and IaC.
• Establish observability strategies for distributed systems to enable proactive issue resolution.
• Define SOPs and runbooks to ensure repeatable work and accountability.
• Track metrics for health and benefits realization; report to leadership.

Skills

Program management

Cross-functional leadership

Agile/Scrum

Executive communication

Vendor & partner management

Job description

Senior Program Manager - Cloud Operations

A little bit about us

Bespin Global is a top global cloud MSP recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 8 consecutive years. We also won the AWS MSP Partner of the Year globally and many Google Partner of the Year awards!

We have 1,300+ "Bespineers" across 16 offices and 10 countries including the U.S., South Korea, Singapore, Dubai, Indonesia, China, and Tokyo, serving more than 4,500 customers worldwide.

If you want a fun and exciting role at a fast-growing company with lots of opportunities, this is the place for you.

Position Summary

The Senior Program Manager for Cloud Operations is the connective tissue between our scrum teams, application teams, and leadership. This role owns the continuous improvement agenda for the Cloud Operations organization - translating leadership strategy into prioritized, sequenced work for delivery teams, and translating delivery reality back into decisions leadership can act on.

This is not a ticket-tracking role. The person in this seat is expected to identify where operational friction is costing the organization time, money, or reliability, and then drive the cross-functional programs that remove it. Success looks like fewer surprises, clearer priorities, faster cycle times, and stakeholders who trust the operating rhythm.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Partner with Cloud Operations leadership to define and maintain a prioritized program roadmap that reflects business objectives, capacity, and risk.
• Facilitate intake and prioritization across competing demands from application teams, security, compliance, and infrastructure stakeholders.
• Maintain a single, authoritative view of in-flight and upcoming work, with clear ownership, dependencies, and target dates.
• Escalate and resolve priority conflicts before they become delivery problems; make trade-offs explicit rather than implicit.
• Translate complex business and technical requirements into actionable cloud transformation roadmaps and architectural guidance.

Process Improvement

• Assess current cloud operations processes - incident, change, request, escalation, and on-call workflows - and identify measurable improvement opportunities.
• Lead process improvement initiatives end to end: current-state analysis, target-state design, stakeholder buy-in, rollout, and adoption tracking.
• Partner with engineering to identify and champion automation opportunities that reduce manual toil and shorten response and fulfillment times.
• Champion DevOps best practices across infrastructure and delivery teams, driving adoption of automated CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Implement and maintain robust cloud and infrastructure observability strategies for distributed systems to enable proactive issue resolution, automated monitoring, and high availability.
• Define and document standard operating procedures, runbooks, and intake paths so that repeatable work is actually repeatable.
• Establish metrics for operational health (cycle time, MTTR, backlog aging, change success rate, toil hours reclaimed) and drive accountability against them.

Cross-Team Alignment and Stakeholder Management

• Work embedded with scrum teams - attending ceremonies as needed, clarifying scope, removing blockers, and ensuring operational requirements are represented in sprint planning.
• Serve as the primary interface between Cloud Operations and application teams, ensuring dependencies, service expectations, and handoffs are understood on both sides.
• Build and maintain executive-level reporting: program status, risks, decisions needed, and outcomes delivered - communicated in the language leadership uses.
• Facilitate steering committees, working sessions, and post-incident or retrospective reviews that produce decisions and owners, not just discussion.
• Proactively surface risks, resourcing gaps, and misalignment early, with recommended options rather than open-ended problems.

Program Governance and Delivery

• Own program plans, milestones, RAID logs (risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies), and change control across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Track and report on benefits realization - connect completed work back to the operational or financial outcome it was meant to produce.
• Ensure programs meet applicable security, compliance, audit, and change management requirements.
• Manage vendor and partner engagements supporting cloud operations programs where applicable.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of program or project management experience, including 3+ years managing complex, cross-functional technology programs.
• Demonstrated experience supporting or working directly with infrastructure, cloud, or IT operations teams.
• Working fluency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) - enough to hold a credible technical conversation, scope work realistically, and challenge estimates.
• Hands-on experience in Agile/Scrum environments, including partnering with product owners and scrum masters on backlog and sprint planning.
• Proven track record of leading process improvement initiatives with measurable, documented outcomes.
• Experience with ITSM practices and tooling (ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or equivalent) across incident, problem, and change management.
• Strong executive communication skills - able to move between technical depth and leadership summary without losing either audience.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and align stakeholders without direct authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud certification (AWS Solutions Architect / SysOps, Azure Administrator, or equivalent).
• Background in a regulated environment (financial services, healthcare, government) with associated audit and compliance exposure.
• Experience driving automation or tooling integration programs that reduced manual operational workload.
• Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization programs.

Core Competencies

Competency

What it looks like in this role

Systems thinking

Sees how a change in one team's process ripples into three others, and plans for it

Turns ambiguous asks into scoped, owned, dated work

Influence without authority

Gets alignment from people who don't report to them

Operational judgment

Knows the difference between urgent and important, and defends the distinction

Produces status updates leadership actually reads and trusts

Follow-through

Closes loops; nothing quietly falls off the list