Director of Cloud

About the Role

Kestra Financial is seeking a Director of Cloud & Platform Engineering to lead and mature our cloud platform organization. This leader will own the strategy, architecture, operations, and reliability of Kestra's Azure cloud environment and evolve the team from reactive infrastructure operations into a modern, service-oriented, SRE-aligned platform engineering function. This newly created leadership role reports directly to the Head of IT Infrastructure & Cybersecurity, with direct oversight of the Cloud Platform team and associated platform engineers.

Responsibilities

• Cloud Strategy & Architecture: 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 the 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.
• FinOps & Cloud Economics: Own the FinOps discipline for Azure, including cost visibility, tagging governance, chargeback/showback models, and spend optimization. Drive year-over-year cloud cost efficiency targets while supporting business growth.
• Platform Engineering & Reliability: 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 postmortems, reliability improvement backlogs, and automation-first operational practices.
• Governance, Risk & Compliance: Ensure cloud platform operations align with NIST CSF 2.0 maturity targets and support the firm's cybersecurity roadmap. Partner with the CISO and Cybersecurity team on identity governance (Azure AD, RBAC, PIM), network segmentation, and security controls within the Azure environment. Support regulatory and audit requirements appropriate for a SEC-regulated financial services firm (e.g., data residency, access controls, logging/retention).
• Team Leadership & Development: Lead, mentor, and grow the Cloud Platform team, including platform engineers, associate engineers, and contractors located in both US and India offices. Build a talent pipeline and workforce plan to support growth—balancing FTE, contractor, and managed service resources. Foster a culture of continuous learning, operational excellence, and accountability.
• Stakeholder & Vendor Management: Serve as the primary technical liaison for Microsoft (Azure account team) and key cloud vendors/partners. Represent Cloud/Platform in the 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 other engineering organizations including Advisor platform, Data, and Dev on cross-team initiatives.

Requirements

• 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—service ownership, SLOs, incident management, and toil reduction.
• Strong FinOps acumen: demonstrated success managing and optimizing cloud spend at scale ($5M+).
• 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.
• Experience with IaC (Terraform, Bicep, ARM), CI/CD pipelines, and modern DevOps practices.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits with a large employer (over 1600 employees nationwide).
• 401(k), health insurance, and a competitive 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.