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 improvement.

• Evaluate emerging cloud-native and AI-assisted engineering capabilities where they can safely improve productivity, quality and operational effectiveness.

7. Client, Executive & Financial Leadership

• Represent Cloud Platform Engineering in executive governance, client service reviews, architecture councils, risk forums and strategic planning discussions.

• Provide clear reporting on delivery health, service quality, resilience posture, technology risk, platform adoption and investment needs.

• Own platform economics, including budget planning, consumption governance, vendor strategy, licensing, capacity and FinOps practices.

• Build confidence through transparent commitments, objective measures and decisive management of issues.

• Influence enterprise priorities and secure sponsorship for investments required to protect service quality and enable product growth.

8. Talent & Organizational Leadership

• Build, lead and develop a globally distributed organization spanning cloud platform engineering, Kubernetes engineering, DevSecOps, reliability engineering and infrastructure operations.

• Establish clear accountability, decision rights, role expectations and outcome-based goals across internal teams and strategic partners.

• Attract and retain senior technical talent; develop engineering leaders, succession plans and deep technical communities of practice.

• Create a culture of ownership, inclusion, constructive challenge, urgency and continuous learning.

• Mentor leaders and engineers while holding teams accountable for engineering quality, operational discipline and measurable business outcomes.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive technology experience, including significant leadership responsibility for cloud platforms, infrastructure engineering, SaaS operations or large-scale distributed systems.

• Demonstrated success owning mission-critical platforms with demanding availability, performance, security, client and regulatory expectations.

• Deep technical expertise in Kubernetes, containers and microservice-based applications, including production platform design and operations.

• Extensive experience with complex Microsoft Azure deployments, with strong knowledge of AKS, Azure networking, identity, security, monitoring, governance and hybrid integration.

• Proven leadership of infrastructure delivery, platform modernization, production operations, incident management, disaster recovery and resilience improvement.

• Strong working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, CI/CD, DevSecOps, SRE, observability and automation practices.

• Experience defining non-functional requirements and applying architecture patterns for availability, scalability, recoverability, performance and security.

• Demonstrated ability to align product, application development, platform, architecture, security and operations teams around shared outcomes.

• Experience leading geographically distributed teams and managing strategic vendors or delivery partners.

• Executive communication skills with the ability to translate technical complexity, operational risk and investment choices into concise business language.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading technology in a regulated financial services environment with mature cyber security, audit, compliance and risk management expectations.

• Bachelor's Degree qualified with a financial or analytical discipline preferred, or relevant experience within the financial services industry

• Experience leading complex cloud native platforms offerings - Azure ,Kubernetes , Kafka based eco systems.

• Architecture-level familiarity with data-intensive platforms, relational and distributed data stores, event-driven systems, APIs and batch/stream processing.

• Experience with tools such as Terraform, Argo CD, Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Elasticsearch, OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor and Log Analytics.

• Experience with reliability testing, chaos engineering, automated recovery and multi-region service design.

• Graduate degree in a relevant technical or business discipline.

What Success Looks Like

• A clear, funded cloud platform strategy and roadmap aligned to Investment Accounting product priorities.

• Predictable infrastructure delivery with transparent commitments, dependencies, risks and outcomes.

• Measurable improvement in availability, resilience, recoverability, incident recurrence, change quality and service performance.

• Standardized, secure and automated Azure and Kubernetes platforms that accelerate application delivery without weakening control.

• Effective joint ownership between SaaS/platform and product/development teams, with fewer handoff gaps and faster issue resolution.

• A strong global engineering organization with clear accountability, deep technical capability and a durable leadership pipeline.

• Executive, client and control stakeholders view the Cloud Platform organization as a trusted, transparent and forward-looking partner.