Director, Technical Products and Operations

Role overview A global healthcare communications agency is hiring a Director-level technical leader to take end-to-end ownership of its flagship client-facing SaaS platform. The role blends deep hands-on engineering with people leadership, covering AWS infrastructure, security and compliance, and the operational reliability that commercial clients depend on. It suits a practitioner who still architects and ships, while mentoring an external platform engineering function.

Responsibilities - Own the full lifecycle of AWS-hosted SaaS products, including architecture, deployment, environment separation, IaC with Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and FinOps-driven cost and performance tuning. - Design and maintain high-availability and disaster-recovery patterns—backups, failover, recovery runbooks—aligned with contractual uptime commitments. - Drive SOC 2 readiness and ongoing control maturity, partnering with Information Security and external auditors on Type I attestation and progression toward Type II. - Enforce least-privilege IAM, encryption, secrets management, audit logging, vulnerability remediation, and coordination of third-party penetration tests. - Operationalize AI and LLM-enabled features safely, with approved providers, data classification, DLP, cost guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls where appropriate. - Run incident response as senior escalation, own SLAs, on-call coverage, change management, release governance, and post-incident reviews, while communicating platform health to executive stakeholders.

Requirements - 7+ years in IT, platform engineering, or cloud operations, including 3+ years running production workloads on AWS (compute, networking, databases, IAM, IaC). - Hands-on practitioner background who has personally implemented and operated a product on AWS, not solely managed others doing the work. - Prior leadership of DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering teams, ideally including external or vendor partners. - Working knowledge of SOC 2 controls and practical implementation of cloud security best practices, including secrets management and tamper-evident logging. - Demonstrated ownership of production reliability: SLAs, incident response, on-call, and HA/DR design. - Strong communicator comfortable translating technical detail for engineering teams and C-suite stakeholders.

Nice to have - Experience delivering a multi-tenant, externally sold commercial SaaS product. - Familiarity with regulated environments such as HIPAA or GDPR, and with pharmaceutical or biotech client data handling expectations. - Track record productionizing AI or LLM features with usage governance and cost controls.

Benefits and work setup - Hybrid model with two in-office days per week for employees within roughly one hour of an office; remote options discussed case by case. - Global team with periodic in-person collaboration, culture, and learning events. - Equal opportunity employer with accommodations available throughout the interview process.