Cloud Operations Lead

Welcome to Xelon - where technology meets innovation and customer centricity. As we continue to grow our Platform team, we are looking for a

Cloud Operations Lead (80-100%)

to join our team. In this role, you own the daily operation of our cloud platform: availability, incidents, recovery, and the service desk that customers reach first. When something has to keep running at Xelon, you make it run.

At Xelon, we deliver secure, scalable, and automated Swiss cloud infrastructure for the next generation of digital services. From IaaS to SaaS, our platform powers workloads in regulated industries like technology, finance, insurance, and public services. Our solutions - Xelon Cloud, Xelon Secure+ and Xelon HQ combine reliability, automation, sovereignty, and simplicity in one ecosystem.

We are on a mission to become the #1 Swiss Cloud Enabler, and we are growing a team of people who want to shape the future of cloud infrastructure and software operations.

Tasks

Your Mission

As Cloud Operations Lead you own the daily operation of our cloud platform: availability, incident response, monitoring, backup and recovery, and the infrastructure underneath. The service desk is part of your team, so you also own what customers experience every time they contact us. You lead a team of four to six people, and you are the person the business relies on when something has to keep running.

Xelon is building a new platform over the coming years. VMware carries the production estate through that transition and stays in place for at least the next two years, alongside other hypervisors. You run that environment, you keep it stable and auditable, and you make sure the transition never happens at the expense of the customers on it.

Platform strategy, target architecture and the technology roadmap sit with the Head of Platform & Technology. You are a close partner in those decisions and you own their operational reality.

What You Own in the First 12 Months

• Availability and customer satisfaction. You hit the agreed availability targets and hold them, and customers experience both the platform and the service desk as dependable, with incidents resolved quickly and communicated clearly.
• ISO 27001 and audit readiness. Operational evidence, documentation and patch compliance stay audit-ready throughout the year instead of being assembled in the weeks before each audit.
• Team depth. No critical part of the platform depends on one person, and every engineer in the team has a development path they can name.

Responsibilities

• Operations and multi-hypervisor environment: Operate and optimise the production estate across a multi-hypervisor environment, with VMware as the primary platform. Keep availability, performance and capacity ahead of demand as the customer base grows. Own hardware lifecycle, capacity planning and datacenter operations together with our partners.
• Networking, storage and datacenter: Own the operational side of network and storage: segmentation, routing, firewalling, DNS, load balancing, and the storage layer underneath the platform. Raise the level of networking knowledge and practice across the team.
• Monitoring, incident response and recovery: Run and improve monitoring, alerting and logging so that problems surface before customers report them. Own backup and disaster recovery, including proving that restores actually work.
• Service desk and customer support: Lead the service desk: intake, triage, ticket quality and response times against agreed service levels. Own what customers experience when they contact us, from the first response through to clear communication during an incident. Act as escalation point for 1st and 2nd level support incidents. Turn recurring tickets into fixes together with the engineering side of the team, rather than absorbing them as routine.
• Team leadership: Lead, coach and develop a team of four to six people across cloud operations and the service desk. Build development plans and remove single points of knowledge. Set on-call, shift and service desk coverage the team can sustain.
• Automation and process: Move recurring manual operations into Infrastructure as Code and scripting. Improve the operational toolchain and the handover points with DevOps, Support and Product. Apply service management practice where it reduces friction, not as an end in itself.
• Compliance and audit readiness: Keep operations aligned with ISO 27001, ISAE and Swiss data sovereignty requirements. Work with Dev- and SecOps on hardening, patch compliance and audit evidence. Maintain operational documentation that holds up in an audit.
• Budget, vendors and procurement: Co-own the operational CAPEX and OPEX budget with the Head of Platform & Technology. Manage vendor relationships, licenses and procurement for the operations estate.

Requirements

Who You Are

We are looking for an operations leader, not an architect. Technical depth matters, and so does the ability to run a team through a platform transition without dropping the service underneath it.

• You keep the service running while the ground moves. A platform transition does not become the customer's problem.
• You lead through presence and clarity, not authority. Your team knows what good looks like.
• You are calm in an incident and precise afterwards. The postmortem produces a fix, not a narrative.
• You treat the service desk as part of the product, not as a queue to be absorbed.
• You tell your manager what is broken and what you need to fix it.

Must Haves

• Leadership: 5+ years leading IT operations, in a cloud, hosting or service provider environment.
• VMware: hands-on experience in production. You have operated it yourself, not only overseen it.
• Infrastructure: practical working knowledge of networking, storage and datacenter operations.
• German and English: you communicate confidently in both, spoken and written.
• Work authorisation: Swiss or EU/EFTA citizenship, or a valid Swiss work permit.

Nice to Haves

• Networking at provider scale - a strong plus: segmentation, routing, firewalling, load balancing and DNS.
• Experience with other hypervisors alongside VMware, and with hypervisor migrations.
• Hands-on Infrastructure as Code, e.g. Terraform or Ansible.
• Monitoring and logging at scale, e.g. Prometheus, Grafana or a similar stack.
• Operating experience in a regulated environment: ISO 27001, ISAE or SOC 2.
• Running operations through a platform migration or a consolidation.

Benefits

What Xelon Offers

• A leadership role with real ownership in a Swiss cloud provider, not a coordination layer.
• A platform in transition, which means your operational decisions change something visible.
• Office in Zug with a hybrid working model, 80 to 100 percent.
• Direct collaboration with the Head of Platform & Technology and cross-functional teams.
• A team small enough that you know what everyone is working on.
• Competitive salary, modern tooling and a product-driven environment with clarity and ownership.

Join Our Mission

Do you feel like you are the person that would complete our team? Are you ready for a new challenge? Then apply now. We look forward to hearing from you.

The Xelon Team