Cloud Operations Team Lead

JOB SUMMARY:

Be part of a fast moving, lean product development Organization, supporting the Lone Wolf family of Applications. Serve as the hands-on Team Lead for a Cloud Operations team responsible for the reliability, performance, changes, releases, maintenance, and day-to-day operation of infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and a private data center. Guide and mentor a small team of engineers while remaining actively engaged in the work, partnering with Development, Product, IT, DBA, and SRE teams to keep Lone Wolf's hybrid, multi-cloud environment stable, secure, and scalable across all product lines.

ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES:

• Lead a team of Cloud Operations Engineers, providing day-to-day technical direction, prioritization, and hands-on support

• Mentor and develop engineers by sharing best operational practices and deepening the team's understanding of the applications and infrastructure they support

• Help build a best-in-class team in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment spanning AWS, Azure, and a private data center

• Operate, monitor, and maintain infrastructure and platform resources across AWS, Azure, and on-premises data center systems

• Recommend and help implement tooling that drives operational efficiencies

• Support orchestration, self-service, infrastructure-as-code, and messaging platforms in partnership with the SRE and DBA teams

• Manage and conduct infrastructure changes and application releases as per Release Management team schedule and needs

• Manage and conduct proactive maintenance of systems to ensure compliance and stability

• Respond to and help lead resolution of operational incidents, coordinating across teams and vendors as needed

• Provide analysis of operational efficiencies gained from increased automation, and evaluate new tools and processes to further improve operational and development outcomes.

OFF-HOURS / ON-CALL EXPECTATIONS:

• Participate in a rotating on-call schedule providing after-hours and weekend coverage for Cloud Operations incidents and escalations

• Serve as an escalation point during off-hours for incidents that require hands-on infrastructure expertise across AWS, Azure, or the private data center

• Coordinate off-hours maintenance windows, planned releases, and change activity in partnership with the Release Management team

• Help establish and refine on-call runbooks, escalation paths, and handoff procedures to reduce mean time to resolution.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• 5+ years of operating and maintaining infrastructure and platforms in AWS, Azure, and private data centers

• 5+ years of building and maintaining automation

• 2+ years of proven leadership experience

• Experience with AI driven tools to assist with analysis, changes, and troubleshooting

• Experience with tools such as K8, Ansible, Terraform

• Experience with Azure Service Bus and queueing technologies

• In-depth understanding of network concepts

• In-depth understanding of security practices

• Background in an infrastructure role: Server, Network, Storage, etc.

• Experience working for a high growth SaaS company

• Agile, lean, or similar development methodologies/experience

• Experience carrying a production on-call rotation, including after-hours incident response and escalation

KNOWLEDGE/SKILLS/ABILITIES:

• Ability to use a wide variety of open-source technologies and tools

• Ability to leverage AI platforms to enhance individual/team performance

• Ability to code and script

• Experience with systems and IT operations

• Comfort with frequent, incremental code testing and deployment

• Strong grasp of automation tools

• Data management skills

• A strong focus on business outcomes

• Comfort with collaboration, open communication and reaching across functional borders

• Process re-engineering

• Communicating and collaborating with others

• Experience across multiple cloud providers (AWS and Azure) a plus

• Self-motivated and able to work in a small team with minimal supervision

• Desire to deliver the best solutions for the need

• Ownership of any output delivered

• Ability to justify decisions made within the work being delivered

• Ability to use data to drive decisions