Managing Director, Cloud Platform

The senior technology leader accountable for the strategy, engineering, delivery and operation of the cloud platform underpinning mission-critical investment accounting SaaS products. The role owns infrastructure outcomes end to end, including availability, resiliency, scalability, security, recoverability, performance, cost effectiveness and operational readiness.
This leader will set the platform vision and operating model, direct complex Azure and Kubernetes environments, and ensure that infrastructure capabilities keep pace with product priorities and client commitments. The role serves as the principal liaison between SaaS operations, product management, application development, architecture, cyber security, risk and client-facing teams, translating business requirements into durable engineering outcomes.
Success requires an executive who combines deep cloud-native technical credibility with strong organizational leadership. The successful candidate will build accountable global teams, establish transparent governance, reduce operational risk, accelerate platform modernization and represent cloud platform strategy and service health in senior leadership, client and control forums.
Leadership Mandate
Own the cloud platform as a product, with a clear strategy, roadmap, service model, architecture standards and measurable outcomes.
Be accountable for infrastructure delivery and production service quality across the investment accounting SaaS estate.
Drive sustained improvements in resilience, availability, recoverability, performance, security and engineering velocity.
Create a high-trust interface between SaaS/platform teams and product/development teams, with shared priorities and clear decision rights.
Lead through critical incidents and systemic remediation while strengthening a culture of prevention, learning and engineering ownership.
Key Responsibilities
1. Cloud Platform Strategy & Infrastructure Delivery
Define and execute the multi-year cloud platform strategy for Investment Accounting, aligned to product roadmaps, client needs, enterprise architecture and risk appetite.
Own infrastructure delivery from demand intake and solution design through provisioning, validation, release readiness, production operation and lifecycle retirement.
Establish a platform-as-product operating model with defined services, customer experience standards, adoption measures, roadmaps and service ownership.
Lead capacity, performance, scalability and cost planning for complex Azure environments supporting distributed, data-intensive and time-sensitive workloads.
Ensure delivery commitments are realistic, dependencies are actively managed and risks are escalated early with clear mitigation plans.
2. Resiliency, Availability & Operational Excellence
Serve as the executive owner for platform availability, resiliency, recoverability and production infrastructure service quality.
Define and govern service-level objectives, service indicators, error budgets and health metrics in partnership with product and application owners.
Drive multi-region resilience, disaster recovery, backup and restore, failure testing, operational readiness and capacity management practices.
Lead major incident response at the executive level, ensuring timely decisions, transparent stakeholder communication and disciplined recovery.
Institutionalize root cause elimination, problem management, resilience engineering, automation and continuous improvement to reduce repeat incidents and client impact.
Strengthen observability across infrastructure and applications to improve early detection, diagnosis and prevention.
3. Kubernetes & Cloud-Native Engineering Leadership
Set the technical direction for enterprise-grade Kubernetes platforms, particularly Azure Kubernetes Service, across development, test and production environments.
Govern multi-cluster and multi-region platform patterns, cluster lifecycle management, upgrades, patching, node strategy, workload isolation and platform hardening.
Enable microservice-based applications using standardized patterns for service discovery, ingress, identity, configuration, secrets, API management, event-driven integration and workload scaling.
Drive automation through Infrastructure as Code, GitOps and CI/CD practices, with auditable and repeatable deployment pathways.
Guide engineering decisions across containers, distributed systems, networking, storage, observability and platform security, while remaining sufficiently hands-on to challenge designs and lead through complex technical issues.
4. SaaS, Product & Development Partnership
Act as the primary executive liaison from SaaS/cloud platform engineering to product and application development leadership.
Create joint planning mechanisms that connect product demand, application architecture, platform capacity, non-functional requirements and operational readiness.
Partner with development teams to modernize workloads for cloud-native operation and to improve deployability, supportability, resilience and performance.
Clarify ownership across platform and application layers, resolve cross-team impediments and establish shared accountability for end-to-end client outcomes.
Communicate complex platform constraints, risks and investment choices in clear business terms to senior stakeholders.
5. Azure Architecture, Security & Governance
Provide executive and architecture-level oversight for complex Azure deployments spanning compute, AKS, networking, identity, security, data, integration, monitoring and hybrid connectivity.
Ensure platform designs incorporate private connectivity, least-privilege access, managed identity, secrets management, policy enforcement, encryption, image and runtime controls, and appropriate segregation of duties.
Partner with cyber security, enterprise architecture, risk, compliance and audit teams to meet control expectations for a regulated financial services environment.
Embed policy-as-code, secure-by-design patterns, evidence automation and lifecycle controls into platform engineering.
Balance resilience, security, delivery speed and cost through documented architecture and risk decisions.
6. Engineering Transformation & Automation
Advance reusable platform capabilities, self-service engineering and paved-road patterns that reduce application-team friction and improve consistency.
Champion automation of provisioning, deployment, scaling, recovery, testing, compliance evidence and operational workflows.
Drive adoption of modern reliability and DevSecOps practices, including progressive delivery, immutable infrastructure, automated quality gates and controlled rollback.
Use engineering and operational data to identify bottlenecks, prioritize investment and demonstrate measurable