Director, Cloud Engineering

About the Role

As the Director of Cloud Engineering, you will be a senior engineering leader accountable for the strategy, architecture, and operational excellence of Inspira Financial’s multi-cloud platform. Reporting to the Sr. Director of IT Operations, this role owns the end-to-end cloud estate across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure, setting the technical direction for cloud-native infrastructure, platform engineering, and developer experience.

You will build and lead a high-performing distributed team of cloud engineers, SREs, and platform engineers while partnering closely with product, security, data, and application engineering to deliver a reliable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud foundation. This is a hands-on leadership role that balances deep technical credibility with strategic thinking and organizational influence expected at the Director level.

Responsibilities

• Cloud Platform Strategy & Architecture
  • Define and own the multi-cloud architecture strategy across GCP and Azure, aligning platform capabilities with business objectives, scalability requirements, and total cost of ownership targets.
  • Lead architectural decisions for cloud-native workloads, including microservices, containerization (Kubernetes/GKE/AKS), serverless functions, and event-driven patterns.
  • Drive the evolution of the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), enabling self-service infrastructure provisioning, golden-path templates, and standardized deployment pipelines.
  • Establish and enforce cloud governance frameworks, including resource hierarchy, landing zones, policy-as-code, and guardrails across both cloud providers.
  • Evaluate emerging technologies—AI/ML infrastructure, LLMOps tooling, edge compute—and make build-vs-buy recommendations grounded in cost, risk, and strategic fit.
• Infrastructure Engineering & Operations
  • Own Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and practices; ensure all infrastructure changes flow through version-controlled, peer-reviewed pipelines.
  • Oversee GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipeline infrastructure, partnering with application teams to reduce deployment lead time and increase release frequency.
  • Direct SRE practices across the cloud estate: define and track SLIs/SLOs, drive blameless post-mortems, and lead reliability improvements through systematic error-budget management.
  • Own observability strategy—logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting—across cloud environments, ensuring engineers have actionable insight into system health and performance.
  • Lead disaster recovery design, runbook development, and regular DR/BCP testing exercises; drive remediation of identified gaps to closure.
  • Administer and maintain all Microsoft licensing through NCE and MPSA agreements.
  • Maintain network architecture and connectivity across cloud environments, data centers, and supported locations, including VPN, private connectivity (Interconnect/ExpressRoute), and DNS.
• Security, Compliance & Risk
  • Partner with the Security team to implement Zero Trust network architecture, enforce least-privilege IAM, and operationalize Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tooling.
  • Ensure cloud environments meet regulatory and compliance requirements; support internal and external audits by providing architecture documentation, access logs, and control evidence.
  • Define and maintain cloud security baselines, secrets management practices, and data encryption standards across the shared responsibility model.
  • Drive incident response processes for cloud infrastructure events, ensuring timely escalation, containment, and root-cause resolution.
• FinOps & Cloud Cost Management
  • Own the cloud infrastructure budget; implement FinOps practices including cost allocation tagging, chargeback/showback reporting, reserved capacity planning, and rightsizing recommendations.
  • Establish cloud cost visibility and governance mechanisms so engineering teams can make cost-aware architecture decisions in real time.
  • Negotiate vendor agreements and manage strategic relationships with GCP, Azure, and key third-party tooling providers.
• AI-Enabled Cloud Engineering
  • Evaluate, integrate, and champion the responsible use of AI tools across cloud engineering and platform teams, setting standards for AI-driven productivity and innovation.
  • Treat AI as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement—ensuring engineers maintain sound engineering judgment and that AI-generated code and configuration meet the same quality, security, and reliability standards as hand-written work.
• Leadership & People Management
  • Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of cloud engineers, platform engineers, and SREs (onshore and offshore); establish clear career ladders and development paths.
  • Build a team culture grounded in psychological safety, continuous learning, and engineering excellence; champion internal tech talks, documentation habits, and knowledge sharing.
  • Manage headcount planning, recruiting, and onboarding; partner with HR and technical leads to define roles and evaluate candidates.
  • Deliver timely, constructive performance reviews; proactively manage performance issues and recognize high-impact contributions.
  • Serve as a technical escalation path and executive sponsor for major infrastructure initiatives; represent the cloud engineering team in IT governance and steering forums.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on cloud engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership role managing distributed teams.
• Deep expertise in multi-cloud environments (GCP and Azure), including architecture, security, networking, and cost management.
• Proven track record of designing and implementing cloud-native infrastructure, including Kubernetes (GKE/AKS), serverless, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong background in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), GitOps, CI/CD, and observability tools.
• Experience with FinOps practices, cloud cost optimization, and vendor negotiations.
• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure and LLMOps tooling, with a focus on responsible AI integration.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

Location

Oak Brook, IL, USA