Director, Engineering (Public Cloud Infrastructure)

About the role

This is a fully remote position, allowing you to work from home or location of record within the U.S. with no in-office requirements. You must be available five days per week during designated work hours. The work arrangement for this role is subject to change based on business needs and individual performance.

This role requires a technical leader with a strategic mindset, dedicated to delivering scalable, high-quality solutions that meet the needs of our internal application teams and customers across core services powering our Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions. This role will be responsible for leading multiple cloud infrastructure engineering teams, focused on designing infrastructure systems and standards, and/or building and maintaining shared components. You will drive best practices in cloud infrastructure, and ensure efficient execution of the technology roadmap, while working closely with engineering, product management, and business stakeholders in corporate development and procurement to support innovation, scalability, and customer impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead and evolve the company-wide Cloud and Infrastructure strategy, in collaboration with senior leaders and key cross-functional business stakeholders.
• Ensure the value proposition of Cloud technology is clearly articulated and balanced within Paylocity's broader Hybrid Cloud strategy, including public cloud, private cloud, virtualization, and on-premises infrastructure.
• Define architecture standards and technical roadmaps that leverage the right mix of cloud-native, containerized, virtualized, and bare-metal solutions based on business, operational, and financial requirements.
• Drive the adoption of containers and cloud-native architectures where appropriate, while ensuring workloads are deployed on the most effective platform, including Kubernetes, virtualized infrastructure, and traditional compute environments.
• Provide technical leadership for enterprise virtualization platforms and hybrid infrastructure capabilities, ensuring the organization can successfully operate and scale workloads both within and outside AWS.
• Collaborate with Business Development to support M&A research, technology due diligence, platform assessments, and integration strategies.
• Organize and manage Platform and Infrastructure Engineering teams to maximize efficiency, ensuring resource allocation aligns with budget constraints and business goals.
• Lead Incident Response and management efforts for your teams, ensuring adherence to process, optimizing MTTD and MTTR, leading postmortem efforts.
• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement, accountability, and operational excellence within the Infrastructure and Cloud organizations.
• Lead the execution of complex infrastructure modernization and platform engineering initiatives, ensuring quality, scalability, resilience, and timely delivery.
• In partnership with Finance, Product, and Engineering, mature and refine our FinOps practice to ensure infrastructure costs are optimized and aligned with customer value across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments.
• Stay informed on industry trends and emerging technologies across cloud computing, virtualization, platform engineering, automation, and infrastructure operations.
• Ensure adherence to Paylocity security standards, compliance frameworks, resilience objectives, and regulatory requirements.

Requirements

• BS degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in the SaaS software industry operating and scaling solutions across public cloud, private cloud, and enterprise infrastructure environments.
• Human Capital Management domain experience preferred but not required.
• 5+ years of experience leading multiple engineering teams in a high-growth, enterprise-scale, or highly regulated environment.
• Hands-on experience with AWS (or another major cloud provider) and a strong understanding of hybrid cloud architectures integrating public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, virtualization platforms, and bare-metal environments.
• Hands-on experience deploying, managing, and maintaining operating system platforms within enterprise virtualization technologies, specifically Windows Server / Linux on VMware vSphere, Nutanix, Hyper-V, KVM, OpenShift Virtualization, or equivalent, with the ability to architect and operate virtualized infrastructure independent of AWS-native services.
• Demonstrated experience successfully driving platform maturity through consolidation, modernization, migration, standardization, and infrastructure optimization initiatives.
• Experience translating the AWS Well-Architected Framework and broader infrastructure architecture principles into actionable technology roadmaps.
• Experience leading and growing teams that build and manage infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Ansible, Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation, or equivalent automation frameworks.
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, and related operational tooling.
• Deep experience leading teams that operate large-scale containerized platforms orchestrated by Kubernetes, including workload placement across cloud and non-cloud environments.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow high-performing teams, with a strong focus on talent development, succession planning, inclusion, and organizational effectiveness.
• Strong business acumen with the ability to balance strategic vision, operational execution, financial stewardship, and customer outcomes.
• A proven track record of defining technology and business goals and successfully executing against them to drive measurable business value.
• Strong decision-making, prioritization, and collaboration skills, with a leadership style centered on shared ownership and team success.
• Expert-level understanding of modern architecture patterns, infrastructure platforms, engineering frameworks, operational best practices, and scalable technology organizations.
• Demonstrated success leading integration efforts, platform operations, 24x7 production environments, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Detail-oriented, organized, self-sufficient, and capable of finding creative solutions across business, product, platform, and organizational challenges.
• Excellent executive communication and stakeholder management skills, including experience presenting to and influencing executive leadership teams.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• 401(k) match.
• Perks that support you, your family, and your finances.
• Career development opportunities.

Pay

The base pay range for this position is $230,000 - $240,000 per year. Base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This position is eligible for an annual bonus and restricted stock unit grant based on individual performance in addition to a full range of benefits.