Director of Infrastructure and IT Operations

About the Opportunity The hiring organization is seeking a strategic and hands-on Director, Infrastructure & IT Operations to lead the technology capabilities that keep digital products, cloud platforms, and internal teams secure, reliable, and productive. This role oversees cloud infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), production operations, bot mitigation, corporate IT, and helpdesk support, while providing architectural leadership across cloud platforms, networking, identity, observability, and operational tooling. This position spans both internal employee technology and the production infrastructure supporting high-traffic, customer-facing applications. This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States. Key Responsibilities Lead teams responsible for cloud infrastructure, SRE, production operations, corporate IT, helpdesk, and bot mitigation, establishing ownership, operational standards, service-level objectives (SLOs), escalation procedures, and performance metrics.Develop managers, technical leads, and IT staff through coaching, career development, and building a culture of accountability, documentation, automation, and continuous improvement.Build quarterly and annual infrastructure roadmaps aligned with business priorities, growth, security, reliability, and cost, partnering with engineering, product, data, marketing, finance, HR, legal, and executive leadership.Own the reliability, scalability, security, performance, and cost-effectiveness of cloud infrastructure, primarily within AWS.Provide architectural leadership across cloud services, applications, APIs, networking, identity, databases, storage, observability, and integrations while establishing architecture standards, reference patterns, governance, and technical review processes.Partner with engineering to improve deployment safety, performance, and readiness, driving automation, configuration management, and infrastructure as code.Lead capacity planning for growth and demand spikes, eliminating single points of failure, undocumented systems, manual processes, and single-source dependencies.Ensure production and nonproduction environments are properly separated, secured, and monitored, reviewing new systems for architectural fit, supportability, security, and total cost of ownership.Establish and maintain service-level indicators (SLIs), SLOs, availability targets, and error-budget practices for critical systems.Improve observability through centralized logging, metrics, distributed tracing, application performance monitoring (APM), and actionable alerting.Lead major incident management, coordination, executive communication, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action tracking to improve mean time to detect, respond, and recover.Develop and test backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity procedures, and establish sustainable on-call practices.Own strategy and tooling for bot mitigation, scraping protection, automated abuse prevention, and traffic-quality management using technologies such as Cloudflare, DataDome, web application firewalls (WAFs), rate limiting, CAPTCHA alternatives, and device fingerprinting.Partner with cross-functional teams to distinguish malicious automation from legitimate customers, search engines, partners, and approved AI crawlers, establishing monitoring and response procedures.Oversee internal IT services and helpdesk support, establishing service-level expectations for response times, resolution times, user satisfaction, and backlog reduction.Manage the employee technology lifecycle, including onboarding, offboarding, equipment provisioning, access management, asset recovery, and device inventory.Standardize endpoint configuration, encryption, patching, and endpoint detection across laptops, collaboration platforms, productivity software, and telecom services.Establish consistent identity and access management practices across corporate and production systems, implementing role-based access, least privilege, multi-factor authentication (MFA), periodic access reviews, and secure administrative account handling.Support vulnerability remediation, security assessments, audits, vendor reviews, incident readiness, and applicable privacy requirements in partnership with legal and security teams.Manage infrastructure, security, IT, telecom, monitoring, and support vendors, handling evaluations, contract reviews, renewals, licensing, service level agreements (SLAs), and budget management.Improve cloud cost visibility through tagging, allocation, forecasting, tool consolidation, and contract optimization. Required Qualifications 10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, SRE, platform engineering, DevOps, IT operations, or related disciplines.5+ years of experience leading engineering or technology teams, including managing managers or technical leads.Demonstrated experience operating high-traffic, customer-facing platforms in AWS or a comparable cloud environment.Strong understanding of cloud architecture, networking, identity, security, observability, databases, APIs, storage, and distributed systems.Experience managing production availability, incident response, root-cause analysis, disaster recovery, and business continuity.Experience with infrastructure automation, configuration management, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.Experience managing corporate IT, employee support, endpoint management, software licensing, and access provisioning.Experience establishing operational metrics, SLOs, and support standards.Demonstrated ability to manage vendors, contracts, departmental budgets, and cloud costs.Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical risks, architecture, and tradeoffs to executive audiences. Preferred Qualifications Experience with Cloudflare, DataDome, or comparable bot-management and web application protection platforms, including leading bot mitigation or traffic-quality programs.Experience with AWS services, containerized environments, infrastructure as code, centralized logging, and APM tools (such as AppDynamics).Experience supporting large-scale consumer subscription, public-record, data-as-a-service, advertising, or ecommerce platforms.Experience modernizing legacy infrastructure, transitioning systems from external vendors, and consolidating cloud accounts or IT services.Familiarity with privacy requirements and secure handling of sensitive consumer data.Experience building or maturing SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering functions. Measures of Success Improved availability, performance, and stability of customer-facing platforms.Reduced impact and infrastructure costs associated with bots, scraping, and automated abuse.Faster incident detection, response, and recovery, alongside a reduction in recurring incidents.Enhanced observability with reduced alert noise, validated disaster recovery capabilities, and optimized cloud spend.Consistent helpdesk performance, reliable onboarding and offboarding, and robust endpoint security and asset tracking.Strong architecture governance, reduced dependency on undocumented systems or vendors, and demonstrated team development. Compensation and Benefits Annual base salary: $170,000 - $180,000Comprehensive health coverage including medical, dental, and vision insuranceLife insuranceRetirement benefits with employer match