Director, Engineering (Public Cloud Infrastructure)

Primary 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.

Education And Experience

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.