Director of Cloud & Kubernetes Platform

Job Title: Director, Cloud & Kubernetes Platform Engineering

Position Summary:

We seek a visionary and technically accomplished Director of Cloud & Kubernetes Platform Engineering to lead the design, development, and evolution of our cloud-native platform capabilities. This strategic engineering leadership role is pivotal in building scalable, secure, and resilient cloud and container platforms while driving innovation in platform development across the organization.

The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in cloud platform engineering across Azure, GCP, and AWS and Kubernetes ecosystem development, and multi-cloud architectures, along with a proven track record of building and leading high-performing platform engineering teams. Your engineering leadership will be instrumental in designing foundational platform capabilities, developer experiences, and self-service infrastructure that accelerate the entire engineering organization.

Job Responsibilities:

Platform Engineering Strategy

• Define and execute a forward-looking cloud and Kubernetes platform engineering strategy aligned with enterprise goals and digital transformation initiatives.

• Own P&L responsibility, technology budget management, and ROI optimization for enterprise platform investments across Azure, GCP, and AWS. 

• Develop and implement platform engineering roadmaps that align business goals with technical execution plans.

• Translate long-term platform vision into prioritized, actionable engineering workstreams.

• Lead the development of strategic platform roadmaps to drive engineering velocity, scalability, and resilience.

Multi-Cloud Platform Development & Architecture

• Develop our next-generation cloud-native platforms spanning Azure, GCP, and AWS enabling scalable, portable workloads across a unified multi-cloud estate.

• Design and implement cloud-specific platform capabilities: AWS landing zones using Control Tower and Organizations; Azure platform engineering with Management Groups, Policy, and Blueprints; GCP platform design leveraging Organization Policies, Shared VPC, and Resource Hierarchy.

• Build and govern a consistent cloud abstraction layer that normalizes networking, IAM, secrets management, and compute across all three hyperscalers.

• Lead the engineering of cloud-native managed Kubernetes services Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE into a cohesive, centrally governed multi-cluster platform.

• Design and build internal developer platforms (IDPs) that deliver self-service cloud provisioning, improving developer productivity and time-to-deploy across all cloud environments.

• Lead the engineering of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) frameworks, CI/CD platform toolchains, and automation pipelines to support rapid, repeatable delivery across clouds.

• Drive platform reliability engineering through proactive design, SLO-based engineering, error budgets, and scalable capacity planning.

• Establish and govern cloud platform standards, blueprints, and golden paths for engineering teams to build upon.

Kubernetes & Container Platform Engineering

• Lead the design, development, and lifecycle management of enterprise Kubernetes platforms across EKS, AKS, and GKE, including cluster architecture, networking, storage, and multi-tenancy patterns.

• Engineer a unified multi-cluster management plane enabling consistent deployment, policy enforcement, and observability across cloud providers.

• Build and mature container platform capabilities including image management, runtime security, policy enforcement, and workload scheduling.

• Drive adoption of service mesh, advanced networking, and observability tooling within the Kubernetes ecosystem.

• Partner with security teams to embed platform-level security controls, pod security standards, and supply chain security practices.

Cloud Networking & Connectivity Engineering

• Partner with the networking team on the design and engineering cloud networking foundations including AWS Transit Gateway and VPC architecture, Azure Virtual WAN and Hub-Spoke topologies, and GCP Shared VPC and Cloud Interconnect patterns.

• Support the networking team on the build and maintain private connectivity frameworks such as AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and GCP Dedicated Interconnect, ensuring high-availability hybrid and multi-cloud network paths.

• Partner with the networking team on engineering of DNS, traffic management, and load balancing platforms across cloud providers to support global application delivery.

Cloud Identity, Security & Compliance Engineering

• Engineer cloud identity and access management platforms across AWS IAM and SCPs, Azure Entra ID (Active Directory) and Conditional Access, and GCP IAM with Workload Identity Federation.

• Engineer cloud governance frameworks and embed compliance controls (e.g., HIPAA, SOC 2) natively into the platform using AWS Config, Azure Policy, and GCP Organization Policies.

• Champion platform-level security engineering practices across all cloud environments, including secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, GCP Secret Manager), identity federation, and zero-trust networking.

• Leverage cloud security posture management (CSPM) tooling and integrate findings into engineering workflows.

Team Leadership

• Inspire, mentor, and manage a global team of cloud platform engineers, Kubernetes specialists, and DevOps practitioners.

• Cultivate a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, accountability, and continuous learning.

• Recruit, develop, and retain top platform engineering talent.

Cost & FinOps Engineering

• In partnership with the Cloud FinOps team Design cost-aware platform architectures and implement FinOps practices to optimize cloud expenditure across AWS, Azure, and GCP without compromising performance or security.

• Build tooling and dashboards leveraging AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, and GCP Cloud Billing to give engineering teams visibility into resource utilization and cost attribution.

• Architect tagging strategies, resource hierarchies, and chargeback models to drive engineering accountability for cloud spend.

Innovation & Platform Evolution

• Stay ahead of emerging cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes ecosystem developments, and hyperscaler service releases, proactively integrating capabilities that enhance platform value.

• Drive adoption of emerging patterns including GitOps, eBPF-based networking, WASM workloads, and AI/ML platform infrastructure across AWS SageMaker, Azure ML, and GCP Vertex AI.

Qualifications & Critical Skills

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.

• 15+ years in engineering, including 6+ years in cloud platform or infrastructure engineering leadership roles.

• Demonstrated experience leading large-scale cloud platform engineering programs and Kubernetes-based transformations.

• Deep, hands-on expertise across all three major hyperscalers: AWS (EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, Control Tower), Azure (AKS, Entra ID, Virtual WAN, Azure Policy), and GCP (GKE, Shared VPC, Organization Policy, Vertex AI).

• Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes — including cluster design, operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), Helm, and the broader CNCF ecosystem.

• Proven experience engineering and operating managed Kubernetes platforms: Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE at enterprise scale.

• Strong command of platform engineering principles: internal developer platforms, golden paths, self-service infrastructure, and developer experience (DevEx).

• Proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Pulumi), GitOps (Flux, ArgoCD), and CI/CD platform tooling.

• Strong understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles — SLOs, SLIs, error budgets — applied at the platform layer.

• Experience with cloud-native security engineering including RBAC, policy-as-code (OPA/Gatekeeper), CSPM tooling, and supply chain security.

• Relevant cloud certifications preferred: AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect.

• Proven ability to drive cross-functional collaboration and deliver exceptional platform outcomes for internal engineering customers.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage effectively with both technical teams and senior executives.

Office requirement: We are Flex and Connect with 2 days a week in office.

Relocation is not budgeted for this role