Senior Director, Cloud Platform Engineering

Job Description:

This position is responsible for executing Vertex’s Cloud Platform strategy by partnering closely with Product Management, Cloud Operations, IT, and other organizations.  You will lead a team of talented and experienced Cloud Platform Engineers who will build a resilient and secure platform that powers our products and serves Vertex customers. You will be at the forefront of driving a multi-year journey to build and transform our Cloud Platform organization. You believe in making both the Developer and Customer experience easy by building and continuously evolving the the platform to deliver products to Vertex customers.

You will own Vertex’s Cloud Platform strategy including implementation and operationalization. In this role, you will be responsible for identifying and driving resolution to security issues in a broad range of products. You will build and develop a team of high-performing platform engineers developing platform solutions.

Work with product architects to develop roadmaps and recommendations to drive enhancements of Cloud Platform architecture, governance, and standards.
Identify, incorporate, and articulate cloud engineering imperatives such as security, availability, performance, cloud cost management and compliance.
Actively partner with our Infrastructure teams on the development and automated deployment and scaling of Vertex products and supporting services.
Recommend and validate controls and improvements across our infrastructure stack.

Perform service configuration reviews for Vertex’s cloud-based SaaS platform and services. Own and build relationships with key external stakeholders such as customers, vendors, and auditors. You'll provide technical guidance to product teams working on platform and cloud engineering relevant technologies, and will contribute to the automation of infrastructure across our public cloud infrastructure.

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Build a highly effective leadership team through mentoring and formal education that focuses on software engineering management principles
• Build a world class team of platform engineers by attracting and hiring high quality talent across US and India.  We are expanding in India, so part of your time in this role will involve working closely with rest of engineering in supporting a development center in India, and attracting the best talent there.
• Work with senior management and align roadmaps, communication strategy and evolution of platform based on their feedback and users of the platform.
• Define quarterly goals and Key Performance Indicators aligned with corporate OKRs
• Direct and mentor leaders on performance gaps, career development opportunities, and strategies
• Direct and coach leaders on all human resource related processes including onboarding, performance management, succession planning, employee relations, selection, terminations, compensation and rewards
• Accountable for collective results and recognizing others’ contributions and share credit for success
• Own attainment of high employee satisfaction and retention; lead development of program and initiatives within group to attain high employee satisfaction
• Direct and influence change management initiatives to drive improvements and efficiencies cross-functionally
• Ability to direct and interact collaboratively and communicate effectively with external, internal customers, and stakeholders to address issues and ensure alignment across the organization to drive customer success
• Prepare and manage budget as assigned; analyzes variances and initiates corrective actions to maximize operational performance

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES:

• Deep experience with building a SaaS-enabled customer platform that powers the consumption of enterprise solutions
• Lead developer platform, application hosting platform, observability and cloud governance teams.
• Act as a product and solutions leader for the organization by designing mechanisms to deeply understand our internal customers who use the platform and their pain points
• Engage with external vendors in negotiations and drive Vertex's cloud governance strategy, getting involved in build vs buy decisions as needed 
• Demonstrated ability to engage executive leadership and drive strategic outcomes 
• Strong architectural abilities towards building a holistic developer experience 
• Deep knowledge of one cloud provider between AWS and Azure and working knowledge of other clouds
• Experience leading teams who have deep expertise with Kubernetes, Istio, Docker, etc. is preferred.
• Experience with observability tools like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana is a plus.
• Experience with Gitlab, Artifactory, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD and good understanding of different deployment architectures 
• Partner with Engineering and Developer Experience leaders to establish relationships with key cloud and software vendors, managing costs and generating the highest ROI possible on investments in tooling
• Experience with cloud cost governance involving forecasting and managing costs
• 10+ years in a strategic engineering leadership role, setting vision and leading teams of 50+ people with excellent experience in leading and evolving managers
• 7+years of experience leading an organization to architect, design, implement or operate public cloud systems at scale.
• 7+ years of experience applying cloud platform, container based technologies and observability at scale.
• Preferred qualifications
• Certification in public cloud deployment (e.g., AWS Cloud Solutions Architect).
• Understanding of the components that comprise a successful cloud platform.
• Ability to document and explain technical details in a clear and concise manner.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent, Masters in Technology or Management preferred
• Fifteen (15) plus years of experience in the software domain
• Ten (10) plus years of leadership experience
• Or equivalent combination of education and/or experience