Director, Technical Products and Operations

At Real Chemistry, making the world a healthier place isn’t just an aspiration-it’s our everyday reality. Our drive to transform healthcare is informed by our blend of deep scientific expertise, human-centred creativity, and AI-driven insights, fostering a unique environment where innovation thrives and our people are impact-obsessed. As a global agency, we provide a full suite of services across healthcare communications and marketing to our clients, including top players in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

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Director, Technical Product Operations

Role Summary

Real Chemistry is seeking a hands-on Director, Technical Product Operations to own the end-to-end management, operation, and security of our flagship client-facing SaaS products.  These platforms are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivered to clients as a commercial product, engineered to be SOC 2 compliant, and increasingly powered by AI-enabled features.

This is a working leadership role - not a purely strategic one. The successful candidate is a technically credible, roll-up-your-sleeves operator who has personally implemented and run a product on AWS infrastructure, and who can lead a team while remaining directly engaged in architecture, deployment, security, and production support. You will be the single point of accountability for platform availability, performance, security posture, and the fully-supported client experience.

What you'll do:

Platform Ownership & AWS Operations

• Own the full lifecycle of the client-facing SaaS products hosted on AWS - from infrastructure design and deployment through ongoing operation, optimization, and support.
• Architect, implement, and maintain scalable, resilient AWS environments (compute, storage, networking, databases, backups) with clear separation across development, staging, and production.
• Lead high-availability and disaster-recovery (HA/DR) design, including backup, failover, and recovery procedures, to meet client and contractual uptime commitments.
• Manage infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and controlled promotion paths between environments.
• Own observability - metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting - and drive continuous improvement of platform performance and cost efficiency (FinOps).

Security, Compliance & SOC 2

• Maintain and continuously mature the platform's security posture, ensuring controls are designed, implemented, evidenced, and audit-ready.
• Own SOC 2 compliance for the platform - partnering with Information Security and external auditors to sustain Type I and progress toward Type II attestation.
• Enforce least-privilege identity and access management (AWS IAM), encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, and tamper-evident audit logging.
• Coordinate third-party penetration testing, vulnerability management, and remediation within defined risk timelines.
• Ensure client-facing security, data-handling, and confidentiality requirements are met and clearly documented for client assurance.

AI-Enabled Product Features

• Support the secure integration and operation of AI/ML and LLM-enabled features within the product, including approved AI providers, usage boundaries, and cost guardrails.
• Partner with engineering and data teams to productionize AI capabilities with appropriate data classification, DLP, and human-in-the-loop controls where required.

Support, Reliability & Client Experience

• Ensure the product is fully supported - establishing SLAs, incident response playbooks, on-call coverage, and runbooks for production systems.
• Serve as senior escalation point for platform incidents, driving rapid resolution and transparent client communication.
• Own change management, release governance, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve reliability.

Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Lead, and mentor the external IT / platform engineering team, setting technical standards and delivery discipline.
• Partner closely with Information Security, Product, and Client-facing teams to align platform capabilities with commercial and client needs.
• Communicate platform health, risk, and roadmap clearly to both technical teams and executive / C-suite stakeholders.
• Manage relationships with key vendors and third parties (AWS and supporting services).

Required Qualifications

• Hands-on track record - the candidate must be a practitioner who has personally implemented and operated a product on AWS infrastructure, not solely a manager of others who do.
• Demonstrated experience implementing a product on AWS (compute, networking, databases, IAM, IaC) from build through production operation.
• 7+ years in IT / platform engineering / cloud operations, including 3+ years operating production workloads in AWS.
• Prior leadership or people-management experience, ideally leading external IT, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering functions.
• Strong working knowledge of SOC 2 (and adjacent frameworks) and the practical implementation of the underlying controls.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud security best practices (least-privilege IAM, secrets management, logging/audit).
• Proven ownership of production reliability - SLAs, incident response, on-call, and HA/DR.
• Excellent communication skills - equally comfortable with hands-on technical teams and C-suite stakeholders.

What you should have:

• Experience delivering a client-facing / commercial SaaS product (multi-tenant, externally sold).
• Experience productionizing AI / LLM-enabled features and governing AI usage, data handling, and cost.
• Familiarity with regulated or enterprise-client environments (HIPAA-adjacent, GDPR, GxP).
• Experience with containerization/orchestration (ECS/Fargate, EKS), AWS Lambda, and observability tooling.
• Relevant certifications (AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps / Security, CISSP, CCSP).
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.

Pay Range:$200,000-$235,000

This is the pay range the Company believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting.  Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on job-related, non-discriminatory factors including but not limited to work experience, skills, certifications, and geographical location. The Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time

Real Chemistry is proud to be Great Place to Work® certified; check out what our people shared about our culture and workplace on our Great Places to Work Profile here.

We believe we can do our best when feeling our best, which is why we’ve put together a benefits program designed to give you the support you and your family need at every stage of life. Real Chemistry offers a comprehensive benefit program and perks, tailored to your region. Globally, this includes offices in our key markets with free snacks to keep you running all day long, generous holiday and paid time off, options for private medical, dental, and vison plans, and support in saving for the future. Other perks include mental wellness coaching and support and access to more than 13,000 online classes with LinkedIn Learning.  Learn more about our great benefits and perks and search specific offerings in your region at:  www.realchemistrybenefits.com.

At Real Chemistry, we believe we're at our best when we're connected. Our Real Hybrid and Regional Teams (Real HART) approach is designed to foster collaboration, learning, innovation, and meaningful relationships while providing flexibility where appropriate. Because our workforce spans multiple countries, regions, and client needs, work arrangements may vary by role and location. Some positions offer hybrid or remote flexibility, while others require regular in-office presence. For example, certain teams and regions, including some of our UK operations, have office-based requirements. Your recruiter will discuss the specific expectations for the role you're pursuing during the interview process and keep you informed throughout the hiring journey. For employees located within a one-hour commute of a Real Chemistry office, we require in-person attendance two days per week, either from a Real Chemistry office or when working onsite with clients. Employees in regions without a nearby office may work remotely and come together throughout the year for collaboration, culture-building, learning, and team connection opportunities. While these guidelines reflect our current workplace model, we understand that everyone’s circumstances are unique. If you require additional flexibility, we welcome an open conversation with your recruiter and our HR team to discuss your needs and determine what may be possible.

Real Chemistry is an Equal Opportunity employer. We continually strive to build and sustain an inclusive and equitable work environment where our employees feel empowered to leverage all they bring from their personal lived experience and professional expertise, to make our team the best in the industry. We encourage motivated and qualified applicants to apply without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, ethnic or national origin, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, marital information, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local employment discrimination laws where Real Chemistry operates. Should you require accommodations throughout the interview process please let your recruiter know.

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