Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Firstup is a company dedicated to improving employee experience through innovative communication solutions. They are seeking a Director of Cloud Operations to lead their cloud infrastructure and operational practices, ensuring reliability and efficiency across their SaaS platform while fostering a high-performing team.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
- 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)
- 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
- Ensure stability and support for existing customers while maintaining clear operational boundaries with the cloud platform
Skills
- 10+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps roles
- 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
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS (multi-region architectures)
- Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized environments
- Solid understanding of microservices and distributed systems design
- Familiarity with serverless architectures and modern cloud-native patterns
- 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
- 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
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)
- CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI or similar)
- Observability platforms (Datadog or equivalent)
Benefits
- Excellent PTO program
- Great health benefits
- A casual and friendly environment
- Remote work
- A leadership team who truly believes in your growth – both personally and professionally
Company Overview
Firstup is an employee communication and engagement platform connecting companies with their valued asset and their employees. It was founded in 2010, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, USA, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is https://firstup.io/.Company H1B Sponsorship
Firstup has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1 in 2024. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.