VP Infrastructure Operations

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

📋 Description

• Cloud Infrastructure Leadership - Oversee the design, deployment, and enhancement of the company's cloud infrastructure, with a primary focus on AWS and GCP to address both present and future business needs.

• Strategy Development - Create and implement a cloud strategy that ensures scalability, cost-effectiveness, and business continuity while aligning with supporting capabilities (monitoring, alerting, tooling), company goals, and Technology/Product roadmaps. Collaborate with Senior Leadership and key stakeholders to align the infrastructure strategy with overall business objectives and develop a strategic roadmap that ensures Infrastructure Operations is in sync with business goals.

• Leadership - Guide and mentor teams of DevOps/SRE/Infrastructure Engineers, emphasizing ongoing professional development and high performance.

• Operational Excellence - Collect and document operational requirements focused on contractual compliance, business needs, and industry best practices. Utilize these requirements to design effective monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems. Identify and implement automation opportunities to enhance team efficiency. Ensure 24/7/365 operational stability and performance of infrastructure, meeting or exceeding business requirements. Manage capacity planning, change management, and performance tuning to optimize performance while ensuring scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery readiness across all infrastructure components.

• Security and Compliance - Work closely with the security team to guarantee that infrastructure complies with and aligns with necessary frameworks, policies, procedures, and evidence collection requirements (including ISO 27001, ISO 27701, Cyber Essentials). Supervise the effective operation of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans in conjunction with the Security team, ensuring regular testing and continuous improvement.

• Collaboration - Collaborate with Development, Product, Security, and Business teams to ensure business requirements are understood, met, and reported on for the seamless delivery of infrastructure services across the organization.

• Vendor Management - Oversee key vendor relationships with cloud service providers and other third-party vendors. Stay abreast of new products and features that can enhance the return on infrastructure investments.

• Budget Management - Assist in the development, management, and reporting of the infrastructure operations budget, forecasting needs in alignment with business requirements.

⛳️ Requirements

• You have significant experience in senior IT infrastructure leadership with a focus on cloud services.

• You possess extensive experience managing multiple cloud operations teams across various technologies, geographies, and requirements.

• You are an avid “horizon scanner,” keeping up-to-date with industry knowledge, techniques, and potential tools to reinforce your expertise in the field.

• You are well-versed in AWS services (EC2, S3, RDS, etc.) and GCP services (Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, etc.).

• You demonstrate strong leadership abilities in DevOps tools and practices, including CI/CD, automation, and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform).

• You possess a solid understanding and a proven track record in Monitoring, Logging, and Alerting processes and tools.

• You are highly organized and capable of managing intricate details while maintaining a broader perspective.

• You are an effective communicator, comfortable engaging with individuals at all levels of the organization and leading discussions around improvement recommendations.

• You adopt a collaborative working style, ensuring all groups are informed and understand your processes and approaches.

• You are a self-motivated learner with a curious mindset.

• You are resourceful and solution-oriented, making practical considerations for all stakeholders involved.

• You are a natural problem solver with strong analytical abilities.

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, and/or equivalent preferred qualifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect).

🏝️ Benefits

• We invest in, cultivate, and support innovative businesses and technologies that enhance all facets of the research process, making it more open, efficient, and effective.

• The talent we attract is crucial to realizing our vision and growth strategies. Our core values include:

• We are bold in the pursuit of improvement.

• We are collaborative and inclusive.

• We are always open-minded.

• We are from and for the community.

• At Digital Science, our vision is to enable research to flow seamlessly—trusted, collaborative, and accessible—driving breakthroughs that advance humanity. This ambitious mission is achieved collectively by fostering open, collaborative, and inclusive research.

• We firmly believe that to truly innovate and address the complex challenges faced by our clients, including researchers, universities, funders, and publishers, we need a diverse range of perspectives, experiences, and ideas. A rich diversity of voices drives quality insights, enhances collaboration, and ultimately advances knowledge more effectively.

• As an equal opportunity employer, we are dedicated to creating and maintaining a workplace where every individual feels valued and included. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran, or disability status. Beyond recruitment, we strive to foster an environment where inclusivity is integral to our culture, allowing everyone to be their best selves and perform their best work.