Head of Cloud Operations

The Head of Cloud Operations will report directly to the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and will manage, supervise, and govern the entire cloud computing environment and its operations. This is a new role that will enable our organization to harness the power, productivity, and efficiency of cloud computing solutions and services (largely AWS). This role will be the ultimate custodian of cloud-related resources and components and play an important role in aligning cloud solutions with business objectives and goals, overseeing cloud operations from a technical standpoint, managing Cloud partners, and ensuring proper financial stewardship over consumption costs.

The Head of Cloud Operations should have skills that include:

• Business Partnership: Serves as a trusted advisor to leaders within Business functions and supports their mission. Partners with senior business leaders to create technology strategies that support the objectives of their functions. Understands the value drivers of the Business and ensures IT solutions take into account innovation and cost to serve.
• Financial Stewardship: Plays an obsessive and thorough role in containing Cloud consumption costs with a direct line to the Business to partner to reduce financial implications from growth.
• Strategic mindset with the ability to execute: Defines and delivers against strategy, implements automation, improves user satisfaction, and drives for operational efficiencies to obtain measurable business value. Delivers cloud-first business architecture and scalable and flexible solutions to meet business demand.
• IT as a Business Value Driver: Supports the ongoing development, coordination, and execution of the integrated IT strategy including labor, investment choices, organizational priorities, and scorecards and dashboards as well as ensures governance and the definition of IT ways of working.
• Delivers on Technology Strategy: Sees Information Technology as a competitive advantage and understands the value drivers of the business and ensures IT solutions are scalable/provide efficiencies to support operational overhead and advance new therapeutic areas while taking into account innovation and reducing the cost to serve.
• Leadership: Proven ability to build, develop, and lead teams and rally the organization around the vision.

Essential Duties And Job Functions:

• Manage operations of all Cloud computing including AWS and Azure and CloudOps teams to achieve business objectives including the attainment of targets for service levels, resolution time, and project deadlines.
• Contain Cloud consumption costs and ensure a transparent and logical way to bill Businesses for consumption.
• Mature the use of native cloud services to displace third-party applications in partnership with IT peers and business stakeholders.
• Set Infrastructure Operations delivery objectives and targets and deliver a highly available and resilient SaaS platform.
• Lead tactical response to system errors, outages, and failures within the platform and hold a tight grasp on user experience and systems uptime.
• Conduct post-mortem root cause analysis reviews and implement changes as a result of findings.
• Effectively manage partners and vendors.
• Deliver regular reports that provide qualitative and quantitative descriptions of platform performance including uptime, SLA attainment, and error rates.
• Manage workflows and schedules for direct reports and ensure adequate workload coverage, including on-call support leveraging a global organization.
• Manage, define, and own key processes related to the operations of the SaaS platform.
• Develop and maintain operational procedures and policies consistent with compliance and security practices.
• Serve as a manager, mentor, knowledge resource, and escalation point for TechOps employees; Build credibility and trust within the team.
• Enhance business value through collaborative identification of Business needs.
• Deliver on portfolio investments and ensure business value/outcomes are realized based on prioritized business needs.
• Ensure governance and executive sponsorship across business units.
• Ensure necessary business processes are documented and business ownership is available for projects and ongoing compliance activities.

Education/ Experience/ Skills:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, business administration or related field, or equivalent work experience
  20 or more years in IT and business/industry, 10+ years of industry experience in an operations/engineering support role in a 24/7/365 environment
• Expert experience in AWS services. EC2, VPC, DynamoDB, Route53, Elasticache
• A minimum of 8-10 years of leadership responsibilities
• Experience managing delivery via shared services centers is preferred
• Experience in business/industry (beyond IT), managing cross-functional teams or projects, and influencing senior-level management and key stakeholders
  Pharma experience preferred
• Experience with SAP integration a plus
• Strong leadership capability, executing as appropriate in the areas of responsibility
• Expertise in budget planning, financial management, and workforce management
• Broad knowledge of current and emerging technologies, technology directions, and strategic application to business needs including the ability to differentiate between a relevant trend and hype
• Ability to improve operational efficiency, service delivery, and information management across the IT organization
• Excellent oral and written communication skills, including the ability to explain technology solutions in business terms, establish rapport and persuade others