Senior Director, Infrastructure -Infrastructure and Reliability

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters-at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.

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By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

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If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

We are hiring a Senior Director of Infrastructure for our Product and Technology organization - a strategic leadership role accountable for designing, building and operating the cloud infrastructure that powers our platform, products and services. You will define infrastructure strategy and architecture, lead the transformation toward Infrastructure-as-Code and cloud-native operations, ensure reliability and security at scale, optimize costs, and build a team of infrastructure engineers who deliver operational excellence. You will partner closely with engineering teams, security, observability, performance engineering, and the product organization to ensure infrastructure enables rapid innovation while maintaining security, reliability and cost efficiency.

Role overview

As Senior Director of Infrastructure, you own the cloud platform, infrastructure architecture and operations that enable the entire company to build, ship and run software reliably and securely. You are accountable for infrastructure strategy, cloud architecture, deployment infrastructure, infrastructure security, observability infrastructure, disaster recovery, capacity planning and cost management across all production systems, development environments and support infrastructure.

This is a strategic leadership role that combines deep technical expertise with broad organizational influence. You will establish infrastructure standards, drive adoption of cloud-native practices and Infrastructure-as-Code, build automation and self-service capabilities for engineering teams, ensure infrastructure meets security and compliance requirements, and drive cost optimization across cloud platforms. You work closely with engineering teams, security operations, observability, performance engineering, product leadership and cloud operations to ensure infrastructure is the reliable foundation upon which innovation happens.

Your mandate is to transform infrastructure from a reactive, ticket-driven operation into a proactive, automated, self-service platform that enables engineering teams to deploy and operate systems independently while maintaining security, reliability and cost efficiency. Infrastructure is not separate from product development - it is a critical enabler. You will lead this transformation while building a high-performing team and delivering measurable improvements in deployment velocity, system reliability, security posture and cost efficiency.

Duties and accountabilities

Cloud platform and architecture strategy

• Define organization-wide cloud strategy, platform architecture and infrastructure vision aligned with product strategy, scalability requirements and business goals.
• Own multi-cloud strategy (if applicable): determine which workloads run on which platforms, manage vendor relationships, optimize for cost and capability.
• Establish infrastructure standards, reference architectures and guardrails that make secure, scalable choices the easy choices for engineering teams.
• Define infrastructure roadmap: prioritize platform improvements, deprecate legacy systems, and communicate progress to leadership and stakeholders.
• Ensure infrastructure requirements are embedded in architecture reviews and design documents; make infrastructure-as-code mandatory for all services.

Infrastructure-as-Code and automation

• Lead adoption of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices across the organization; ensure all infrastructure is declarative, version-controlled and reproducible.
• Own configuration management, infrastructure tooling and deployment pipelines; select and implement IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.) aligned with platform strategy.
• Build self-service infrastructure capabilities: enable engineers to provision, configure and deploy infrastructure without infrastructure team bottleneck.
• Automated disaster recovery, backup and recovery procedures; ensure infrastructure is resilient and recoverable.
• Continuously improve automation and reduce manual operations; measure and reduce operational toil.

Reliability, scalability and operations

• Ensure infrastructure meets reliability, availability and scalability requirements; design systems that scale with customer demand.
• Partner with observability team to instrument infrastructure for visibility; ensure all cloud resources, networks, databases and services are monitored.
• Establish infrastructure SLOs and SLIs; maintain high availability and performance of platform services and shared infrastructure.
• Capacity planning and forecasting; ensure infrastructure grows with demand, identify bottlenecks before they impact customers.
• Lead incident response for infrastructure incidents; ensure rapid detection, diagnosis and remediation of infrastructure issues.

Security and compliance infrastructure

• Ensure infrastructure architecture meets security and compliance requirements (network segmentation, encryption, access control, audit logging).
• Partner with security operations to implement infrastructure security controls: IAM policies, network security, secrets management, container security.
• Maintain compliance infrastructure for regulatory requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, GDPR, HIPAA, etc.); support audit and certification efforts.
• Implement infrastructure for security operations: logging, monitoring, alerting, forensic investigation capabilities.
• Manage cloud security posture; monitor and remediate security risks in cloud infrastructure (misconfigurations, exposed credentials, unauthorized access).

Cost optimization and efficiency

• Optimize cloud costs: analyze cloud spend, identify waste, negotiate vendor commitments, implement cost optimization strategies.
• Partner with performance engineering on resource optimization; ensure infrastructure is efficient and no resources are wasted.
• Implement cost allocation and chargeback mechanisms; make infrastructure costs visible to engineering teams and business units.
• Drive infrastructure efficiency initiatives: rightsizing instances, optimizing database costs, managing data transfer costs, leveraging spot instances and reserved capacity.
• Balance cost, performance and reliability; make informed trade-offs between different cloud options and resource configurations.

Agentic AI infrastructure and emerging compute

• Own infrastructure strategy for agentic AI workloads: GPU/ML compute infrastructure, inference serving, model storage and distribution.
• Partner with AI/ML teams to design infrastructure for agent development, testing and deployment; manage inference serving infrastructure.
• Optimize AI infrastructure costs: GPU utilization, batch processing, inference optimization, cost-per-inference efficiency.
• Ensure AI infrastructure is observable and performant; integrate with observability platform for AI workload monitoring.

Infrastructure culture and team leadership

• Build and lead the infrastructure team, including cloud architects, DevOps engineers, database specialists, and infrastructure automation engineers.
• Drive a culture of reliability, automation and operational excellence; make infrastructure work invisible and frictionless for engineering teams.
• Mentor engineers and engineering leaders on infrastructure thinking; embed infrastructure expertise into product teams.
• Communicate infrastructure strategy, wins and progress to engineering leadership, product leadership and executive stakeholders.

What success looks like

• Engineering teams can self-serve infrastructure: provision, configure and deploy systems without infrastructure team bottleneck or manual intervention.
• All infrastructure is Infrastructure-as-Code, version-controlled and reproducible; no manual infrastructure configuration.
• Deployment velocity improves; infrastructure is not a bottleneck to shipping features, and deployment frequency increases measurably.
• System reliability improves; mean time to incident and mean time to recovery decrease, and uptime SLOs are consistently met.
• Cloud costs are optimized and predictable; infrastructure spend per customer or per feature decreases over time without sacrificing reliability or performance.
• Infrastructure is secure and compliant; compliance audits and certifications proceed smoothly, and security posture is strong.
• AI infrastructure scales efficiently; agents deploy rapidly, inference latency meets targets, and cost per inference is optimized.
• Engineering teams view infrastructure team as trusted partners and enablers, not as a bottleneck or overhead.

Required skills and experience

• Proven software engineering or infrastructure experience with 5+ years focused on cloud infrastructure, DevOps or platform engineering.
• Deep hands-on expertise designing and operating cloud platforms; extensive experience with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Proven track record leading infrastructure transformation initiatives at scale; demonstrable impact on deployment velocity, reliability or cost efficiency.
• Strong expertise in Infrastructure-as-Code; hands-on experience with IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible or equivalent).
• Deep experience with container platforms, container orchestration and Kubernetes; design and operate containerized systems at scale.
• Experience designing and operating scalable database and data infrastructure; understanding of relational, NoSQL, caching and data pipeline systems.
• Experience with infrastructure security: network security, IAM/access control, encryption, secrets management, compliance infrastructure.
• Strong expertise in observability and monitoring infrastructure; experience integrating infrastructure with observability platforms.
• Experience with cost optimization and cloud cost management; understanding of cloud pricing models, capacity planning and cost analysis.
• Strong leadership and communication skills; ability to influence engineering teams and executives on infrastructure investment without formal authority.

Scope and expectations

• Strategic leadership role accountable for cloud platform strategy, architecture and operations across the entire company.
• Coverage spans cloud architecture, container orchestration, databases, networking, storage, disaster recovery, security infrastructure and cost management.
• Expected to set standards, influence architecture decisions and drive infrastructure investments across engineering organization with authority but without formal control over all teams.
• People-management role with responsibility for building and developing the infrastructure team (6-8+ people) across cloud architecture, DevOps, database and platform engineering specialties.
• Directly accountable for measurable improvements in deployment velocity, system reliability, security posture and cost efficiency; infrastructure impact is quantified and reported to leadership.

Nice to have

• Experience in a high-scale SaaS, cloud platform, or enterprise software company with significant infrastructure and cost optimization challenges.
• Demonstrated track record of infrastructure cost optimization; experience reducing infrastructure spend by 20%+ while maintaining or improving reliability.
• Experience designing and managing multi-region or multi-cloud infrastructure; managing geographic distribution, disaster recovery and regional failover.
• Experience leading large-scale infrastructure migrations; moving workloads between cloud providers or architectures with minimal downtime.
• Experience designing infrastructure for regulated industries; familiarity with compliance infrastructure (FedRAMP, ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 2).
• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, GPU compute optimization, or inference serving platforms.
• Experience in fast-growing organizations where infrastructure velocity and cost efficiency are critical competitive advantages.
• Published content or conference talks on infrastructure, cloud architecture or DevOps best practices.

Qualifications

Core required qualifications

• Demonstrated hands-on expertise designing and operating cloud infrastructure across multiple cloud platforms.
• Proven experience leading infrastructure initiatives that delivered measurable impact on deployment velocity, reliability or cost.
• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code tools and cloud automation frameworks.
• Deep understanding of containerization and Kubernetes; hands-on experience designing and operating container platforms at scale.
• Experience designing and operating scalable databases and data infrastructure; understanding of database architecture trade-offs.
• Experience mentoring and developing technical talent; demonstrated leadership in building high-performing infrastructure teams.
• Strong communication skills; ability to explain infrastructure architecture and trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 7+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering or DevOps leadership roles.
• Track record of leading infrastructure transformations; demonstrated ability to drive organizational change toward cloud-native practices and Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Experience designing and managing multi-region, multi-cloud or highly complex infrastructure environments.
• Demonstrated success leading cost optimization initiatives; track record of reducing infrastructure spend while maintaining or improving reliability.
• Experience with compliance infrastructure or working in regulated industries; familiarity with compliance and audit requirements.
• Experience designing infrastructure for AI/ML workloads, GPU compute or inference serving.
• Published technical content, open-source contributions, or thought leadership in infrastructure engineering and DevOps.

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.