Dir Systems Engineering

ACI powers the payments ecosystem globally, and you power ACI. You’ll innovate, collaborate, and grow in an energetic technology culture with decades of proven success. Our team represents a globally diverse, passionate, and dedicated group of technology professionals committed to driving the future of payments and making our customers successful.

About the role

We are looking for a Director of Operations Engineering to join our global team as we deploy and operate cutting-edge real-time payment platforms used by global financial and e-Commerce corporations. This leader will be accountable for the long-term reliability, scalability, and operability of the Merchant product portfolio through modern SRE and Operations Engineering practices, with a focus on reducing customer impact via improved detection and recovery (MTTD/MTTR).

The role involves shaping, delivering, and operating our cloud-native, platform-based Merchant services teams, leveraging SRE practices and AI-driven operational intelligence to enhance availability, security, scalability, and customer experience. You will help evolve from traditional cloud operations to internal productized platforms, enabling engineering teams to deploy, operate, and scale services safely and efficiently in a regulated financial services environment.

The ideal candidate thrives in fast-paced environments, is action-oriented, results-driven, and passionate about scalable processes and continuous improvement. You should be comfortable leading geographically dispersed teams and collaborating across a global Cloud Hosting organization.

Responsibilities

• Be a strong people leader—inspire, mentor, advocate for, and develop your team to drive change and innovation in partnership with other business and operations leaders.
• Own service reliability outcomes for the Merchant portfolio, including availability, MTTD, MTTR, and customer impact metrics. Establish and operationalize SLOs, SLIs, and detection SLOs in partnership with Product and Engineering.
• Accountable for day-to-day Service Delivery of the Merchant SaaS Portfolio to customers at the highest levels of quality.
• Lead proactive resilience and observability strategies leveraging unified telemetry, AI-driven anomaly detection, synthetic transactions, and end-to-end traceability.
• Sponsor and scale AI-assisted operations, including automated incident triage, diagnostics, correlation, and executive communication for the Merchant product portfolio.
• Strengthen change governance, release controls, and UAT reliability across Merchant platforms to reduce change-driven incidents and customer impact.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems Management, or related field; equivalent experience (5+ years); or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience leading DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering teams in large-scale cloud environments with demonstrated success driving automation-first operational models in regulated or mission-critical systems.
• Demonstrated experience owning SLOs that include detection metrics and reducing client-detected incidents at scale.
• Experience scaling observability platforms and AI-assisted operational capabilities.
• Proven ability to scale judgment through leaders and represent operational risk and trade-offs crisply at the executive level.
• Proven track record of coaching, mentoring, and managing a team with strong workload management and process development skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Ability to communicate, connect with, and engage executive stakeholders and team members at all levels, both internally and customer-facing.
• Proven skills in budgeting, project structuring, vendor/partner management, staff structuring, and negotiations.
• 15% travel, which may be domestic or international. More travel may be required during initial onboarding.
• Ability to support weekend and off-hours activities as required.

Qualifications

• At least 5+ years leading mission-critical applications and/or platforms in Azure, ideally in the Financial or Payments Industry, including related compliance activities.
• Technical background with a proven ability to apply AI/ML-driven insights (AIOps) to incident management, capacity planning, anomaly detection, and operational optimization.
• Experience architecting, building, and maintaining Application CI/CD frameworks in a Financial Services setting.
• Experience running SRE teams for a modern technology stack using cloud-native technologies with a focus on improving systems availability, performance, and resiliency.
• Strong advocate for DevOps culture, including shared ownership, automation, and continuous improvement across engineering and operations teams.

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. This position does not offer sponsorship for employment visa status or work permits now or in the future.