Head of Cloud Platform Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Define the strategic direction of Totara's cloud platform and oversee the transition of infrastructure towards a modern SaaS operating model.

• Integrate infrastructure and cloud engineering teams under a cohesive operating model with shared standards, on-call practices, and collaborative workflows.

• Advocate for engineering excellence across areas such as infrastructure as code, peer review, operational readiness, and change management.

• Build, mentor, and nurture a high-performing distributed engineering team.

• Manage platform capabilities that empower teams to provision, deploy, and operate services using self-service infrastructure.

• Establish and enhance service reliability through Service Level Objectives (SLOs), recovery objectives, and operational practices.

• Incorporate observability through logging, metrics, tracing, and operational runbooks.

• Minimize operational toil through automation, self-service solutions, and self-healing systems.

• Create repeatable, automated lifecycle management for dedicated customer deployments, ensuring isolation and resilience.

• Take ownership of AWS architecture, security, resilience, and operational effectiveness.

• Integrate FinOps into engineering decisions to enhance SaaS cloud economics at scale.

• Guarantee that the platform is secure, compliant, and resilient by default, meeting evidence, auditability, and regional data residency requirements.

• Lead the expansion into additional cloud providers as customer needs require multi-cloud capabilities.

• Foster platform portability where it provides genuine value while avoiding unnecessary complexity.

• Provide executive insights into service reliability and cloud unit economics.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in leading platform or infrastructure engineering within a growing B2B SaaS organization.

• Extensive hands-on expertise in AWS across areas such as infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform), containers, orchestration, networking, and cloud security.

• Experience in designing and operating dedicated customer or cell-based deployment models, with an emphasis on isolation, resilience, and operational economics.

• Strong Site Reliability Engineering approach, encompassing service levels, incident management, observability, and operational excellence.

• Practical experience in FinOps, demonstrating a history of enhancing cloud cost efficiency.

• Proven ability to lead and grow distributed engineering teams across multiple locations, especially during periods of organizational change or acquisition.

• Experience in regulated industries where security, compliance, and governance are critical design elements.

• Hands-on experience in delivering multi-cloud platforms, with discernment regarding when portability provides real value.

• Experience transitioning products from hosted or self-managed deployments to fully managed SaaS solutions.

• Background in building platforms or ecosystems that allow partners or third parties to extend products.

• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, IRAP, or similar standards.

🏝️ Benefits

• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO).

• Enhanced Parental Leave.

• Opportunities for Professional Development.

• Annual Wellbeing Allowance.

• New Joiner home working setup allowance.

• Additional Paid Leave for your birthday and for working days between Christmas and New Year's Eve.

• Flexible and hybrid working arrangements.