Senior Director, Cloud Operations - Onsite, Santa Clara, CA

Position Summary

Nile is seeking a Senior Director, Cloud Operations to lead the operation, reliability, security, and continuous improvement of the cloud infrastructure supporting Nile’s cloud-managed enterprise networking platform. This role will oversee infrastructure across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), drive operational excellence, and strengthen automation and CI/CD practices in partnership with Engineering, Security, and Product teams.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Infrastructure and Operations

• Lead day-to-day operations, administration, and optimization of Nile’s cloud environments across GCP and AWS.
• Establish standards for cloud architecture operations, environment management, availability, scalability, and resilience.
• Manage cloud resources, capacity, performance, and cost optimization, including monitoring usage and identifying opportunities to improve efficiency.
• Oversee infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, patching, upgrades, backup, and disaster recovery readiness.

Reliability, Monitoring, and Incident Management

• Develop and maintain monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability practices for production services.
• Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions to improve service reliability and reduce recurring issues.
• Define and track operational metrics, service-level objectives, availability, and recovery targets.
• Maintain operational runbooks, escalation procedures, and readiness processes for production releases.

CI/CD and Infrastructure Automation

• Lead the evolution of CI/CD pipelines and release automation in partnership with software engineering teams.
• Oversee infrastructure-as-code and configuration automation using tools such as Terraform and related cloud-native services.
• Promote consistent, repeatable deployment practices across development, staging, and production environments.
• Improve deployment safety through automated testing, approvals, rollback strategies, and release controls.

Cloud Security and Governance

• Partner with Security and Engineering teams to implement cloud security controls, access management, secrets handling, and secure configuration practices.
• Support vulnerability remediation, audit readiness, compliance requirements, and cloud governance standards.
• Establish appropriate access controls and operational processes for cloud accounts, projects, networks, and environments.

Leadership and Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, and develop the Cloud Operations team, setting clear priorities, accountability, and operational standards.
• Partner with Engineering teams to support production deployments, platform reliability, and operational readiness without duplicating ownership of application architecture.
• Collaborate with Finance and leadership on cloud spend visibility, forecasting, and cost-management initiatives.
• Communicate operational risks, incidents, capacity needs, and improvement plans to senior leadership.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, site reliability engineering, DevOps, or cloud operations.
• 10+ years of experience leading technical teams or managing cloud/platform operations.
• Hands-on experience operating production environments on both GCP and AWS.
• Strong understanding of networking, IAM, compute, storage, managed services, and cloud monitoring across major cloud platforms.
• Experience with CI/CD tools and practices, such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar platforms.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and automation, preferably Terraform, along with scripting in Python, Bash, or similar languages.
• Demonstrated experience with incident management, observability, disaster recovery, reliability engineering, and cloud cost optimization.
• Strong leadership, prioritization, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting cloud-native applications and containerized workloads.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes is a plus.
• Experience with automated security controls and compliance checks in CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with service reliability metrics, capacity planning, and continuous improvement of cloud operations.

Measures of Success

• Reliable, secure, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure across GCP and AWS.
• Improved deployment consistency, automation, and release efficiency through effective CI/CD practices.
• Faster incident resolution and fewer recurring production issues.
• Clear operational standards, strong team performance, and effective partnership with Engineering and Security.