Director of Cloud Operations

Firstup · Remote - US

Who We Are

At Firstup, our mission is to improve the employee experience at every moment that matters, large and small. As the communication pipeline for the world's workforce, we now serve 40 of the Fortune 100 companies, reaching and connecting more than 17 million employees daily.

Our employees are experts in the employee experience, workforce communications and technology. 
Joining Firstup means joining a movement to make work better for every worker. As the world’s first intelligent communication platform, Firstup meaningfully engages employees at every moment from hire to retire, and delivers engagement insights to help companies support, promote and retain their talent. Our movement has taken root and is evident in our world-class customer base. Now we need your help. Ready to make a difference in the world?


Job Summary: 

We are seeking a Director of Cloud Operations (CloudOps) to lead and evolve our cloud infrastructure and operational practices across a globally distributed SaaS platform. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our systems running across multiple AWS regions in the United States and Europe.

As part of the senior leadership team, you will partner closely with Engineering, Security, and Product to strengthen operational excellence, enhance system observability, and drive continuous improvement in how we build and run services. You will lead a distributed team of engineers across the US and UK, fostering a high-performing, collaborative, and growth-oriented environment.

This role is ideal for a leader who combines deep technical expertise with a pragmatic approach to improving systems, processes, and team capabilities.

What You’ll Do

  • Cloud Platform & Reliability

  • Own the availability, performance, and resilience of our multi-region AWS platform.

  • Drive improvements in system reliability through well-defined SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and proactive engineering practices.

  • Lead efforts to reduce MTTR and improve incident response effectiveness across the organization.

  • Guide architecture decisions for microservices, Kubernetes (EKS), and serverless workloads to ensure scalability and fault tolerance.

  • Observability & Incident Management

  • Advance our observability strategy using Datadog, ensuring actionable insights across infrastructure and applications.

  • Establish and refine incident management practices, including on-call processes, escalation paths, and post-incident reviews.

  • Act as an incident commander for critical events and contribute to the on-call rotation.

  • Operational Excellence & Efficiency

  • Elevate operational standards through automation, standardization, and adoption of modern best practices.

  • Drive cost optimization initiatives across AWS environments without compromising performance or reliability.

  • Leverage AI and automation to improve operational efficiency, accelerate root cause analysis, and enhance system insights.

  • Continuously improve CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI) and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform).

  • Team Leadership & Development

  • Lead, mentor, and support a distributed team of CloudOps engineers across the US and UK.

  • Foster a culture of accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.

  • Provide technical guidance while enabling the team to grow in ownership and capability.

  • Hybrid & Legacy Environment Support

  • Ensure stability and support for existing customers while maintaining clear operational boundaries with the cloud platform.

    • What We’re Looking For

  • Experience

  • 10+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps roles, with 3+ years experience leading CloudOps/SRE teams.

  • Proven track record of leading operational or platform transformations in a SaaS environment.

  • Experience operating multi-region, customer-facing systems at scale.

  • Technical Expertise

  • Strong hands-on experience with:

  • AWS (multi-region architectures)

  • Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized environments

  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)

  • CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI or similar)

  • Observability platforms (Datadog or equivalent)

  • Solid understanding of microservices and distributed systems design.

  • Familiarity with serverless architectures and modern cloud-native patterns.

  • Operational Leadership

  • Deep experience with incident management, on-call operations, and reliability engineering practices.

  • Strong understanding of SLO/SLI frameworks, monitoring strategies, and performance optimization.

  • Demonstrated ability to balance hands-on technical work with team leadership.

  • Leadership & Mindset

  • Collaborative, pragmatic leader who can influence across teams and functions.

  • Passion for building and supporting high-performing teams.

  • Focus on continuous improvement, with a bias toward measurable outcomes.

    • Apply →