Director of Cloud

Kestra Financial is a wealth‑management platform dedicated to empowering independent financial professionals—including traditional and hybrid RIAs—to grow their businesses and deliver exceptional client service. The company combines advanced business‑management technology with personalized consulting to provide unmatched scale, efficiency, and support.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the cloud platform strategy for Kestra Holdings, aligned with business objectives, regulatory requirements, and the enterprise technology roadmap.
• Own the Azure landing‑zone architecture, subscription hierarchy, governance policies, and hybrid connectivity patterns; drive adoption of the Azure Well‑Architected Framework and formalize governance through an Azure Governance body.
• Partner with Software Engineering, Data & AI, and Cybersecurity leadership to ensure platform decisions support cross‑functional needs.
• Lead the FinOps discipline for Azure, providing cost visibility, tagging governance, charge‑back/show‑back models, and year‑over‑year cloud‑cost efficiency targets.
• Transition the Cloud Platform function toward a service‑based, SRE‑aligned operating model, defining services, SLIs/SLOs, incident discipline, and toil reduction.
• Establish and publish service catalogs, support expectations, and escalation paths for all platform services (compute, storage, networking, data services, DR).
• Implement blameless post‑mortems, reliability‑improvement backlogs, and automation‑first operational practices.
• Ensure cloud operations align with NIST CSF 2.0 maturity targets and support the firm’s cybersecurity roadmap; collaborate with the CISO on identity governance, network segmentation, and security controls.
• Support regulatory and audit requirements for a SEC‑regulated financial‑services firm (e.g., data residency, access controls, logging/retention).
• Lead, mentor, and grow the Cloud Platform team across US and India offices; build a talent pipeline and workforce plan balancing FTE, contractor, and managed‑service resources.
• Serve as primary technical liaison for Microsoft Azure account team and key cloud vendors/partners; represent Cloud/Platform in Architecture Review Board, IT Change Management Board, and Azure Strategy Governance forums.
• Provide regular reporting to SVP and executive leadership on platform health, spend, risk posture, and strategic initiatives; collaborate with Advisor Platform, Data, and Dev engineering groups on cross‑team initiatives.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in cloud engineering, infrastructure, or platform engineering roles, with 5+ years in a people‑leadership capacity (Director or Sr. Manager level) managing a global workforce.
• Deep Azure expertise: landing zones, subscription management, Azure Policy, Entra ID (Azure AD), RBAC, PIM, networking (VNets, NSGs, private endpoints, ExpressRoute/VPN), and compute/storage/data services.
• Proven experience building and operating a platform‑engineering or SRE function—including service ownership, SLOs, incident management, and toil reduction.
• Strong FinOps acumen with demonstrated success managing and optimizing cloud spend at scale ($5 M+).
• Experience operating in a regulated industry (financial services, healthcare, or similar) with familiarity with compliance frameworks (NIST CSF, SOC 2, SEC, FINRA).
• Excellent communication skills; able to present cloud strategy, risk, and spend to executive and board‑level audiences.
• Hands‑on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM), CI/CD pipelines, and modern DevOps practices.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits with a large employer (over 1,600 employees nationwide).
• 401(k) plan, health insurance, and a comprehensive benefits package.
• Supportive, collaborative environment committed to professional excellence.
• Opportunities for training, development, and long‑term growth within the firm.
• Tuition reimbursement for qualified expenses.

Values

Kestra’s mission is powering financial independence for investing clients and the advisors who serve them. The firm lives its values—Serve, Make it Happen, and One Team—to deliver exceptional service and innovation.