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FirstupFI

Director of Cloud Operations

Firstup is fundamentally changing how organizations communicate and is the backbone of the entire Digital Employee Experience.

Firstup

Employee count: 51-200

Salary: 200k-228k USD

United States only

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Who We Are

At Firstup, our mission is to improve the employee experience at every moment that matters, large and small. As the communication pipeline for the world's workforce, we now serve 40 of the Fortune 100 companies, reaching and connecting more than 17 million employees daily.
Our employees are experts in the employee experience, workforce communications and technology.
Joining Firstup means joining a movement to make work better for every worker. As the world’s first intelligent communication platform, Firstup meaningfully engages employees at every moment from hire to retire, and delivers engagement insights to help companies support, promote and retain their talent. Our movement has taken root and is evident in our world-class customer base. Now we need your help. Ready to make a difference in the world?

Job Summary:

We are seeking a Director of Cloud Operations (CloudOps) to lead and evolve our cloud infrastructure and operational practices across a globally distributed SaaS platform. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our systems running across multiple AWS regions in the United States and Europe.

As part of the senior leadership team, you will partner closely with Engineering, Security, and Product to strengthen operational excellence, enhance system observability, and drive continuous improvement in how we build and run services. You will lead a distributed team of engineers across the US and UK, fostering a high-performing, collaborative, and growth-oriented environment.

This role is ideal for a leader who combines deep technical expertise with a pragmatic approach to improving systems, processes, and team capabilities.

What You’ll Do

  • Cloud Platform & Reliability

  • Own the availability, performance, and resilience of our multi-region AWS platform.

  • Drive improvements in system reliability through well-defined SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and proactive engineering practices.

  • Lead efforts to reduce MTTR and improve incident response effectiveness across the organization.

  • Guide architecture decisions for microservices, Kubernetes (EKS), and serverless workloads to ensure scalability and fault tolerance.

  • Observability & Incident Management

  • Advance our observability strategy using Datadog, ensuring actionable insights across infrastructure and applications.

  • Establish and refine incident management practices, including on-call processes, escalation paths, and post-incident reviews.

  • Act as an incident commander for critical events and contribute to the on-call rotation.

  • Operational Excellence & Efficiency

  • Elevate operational standards through automation, standardization, and adoption of modern best practices.

  • Drive cost optimization initiatives across AWS environments without compromising performance or reliability.

  • Leverage AI and automation to improve operational efficiency, accelerate root cause analysis, and enhance system insights.

  • Continuously improve CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI) and infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform).

  • Team Leadership & Development

  • Lead, mentor, and support a distributed team of CloudOps engineers across the US and UK.

  • Foster a culture of accountability, learning, and continuous improvement.

  • Provide technical guidance while enabling the team to grow in ownership and capability.

  • Hybrid & Legacy Environment Support

  • Oversee ongoing operations of a legacy .NET-based solution hosted in private data centers in the US and Europe.

  • Ensure stability and support for existing customers while maintaining clear operational boundaries with the cloud platform.

What We’re Looking For

  • Experience
  • 10+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps roles, with recent experience leading CloudOps/SRE teams.

  • Proven track record of leading operational or platform transformations in a SaaS environment.

  • Experience operating multi-region, customer-facing systems at scale.

  • Technical Expertise

  • Strong hands-on experience with:

  • AWS (multi-region architectures)

  • Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized environments

  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred)

  • CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI or similar)

  • Observability platforms (Datadog or equivalent)

  • Solid understanding of microservices and distributed systems design.

  • Familiarity with serverless architectures and modern cloud-native patterns.

  • Operational Leadership

  • Deep experience with incident management, on-call operations, and reliability engineering practices.

  • Strong understanding of SLO/SLI frameworks, monitoring strategies, and performance optimization.

  • Demonstrated ability to balance hands-on technical work with team leadership.

  • Leadership & Mindset

  • Collaborative, pragmatic leader who can influence across teams and functions.

  • Passion for building and supporting high-performing teams.

  • Focus on continuous improvement, with a bias toward measurable outcomes.

Why Join Us

  • Opportunity to shape and advance the operational foundation of a global SaaS platform.

  • Work with modern cloud technologies and a distributed, collaborative team.

  • Be a key member of the engineering leadership team with direct impact on reliability, scalability, and customer experience.

Firstup expects the base salary for this role to be between $200,000-$228,000. The starting rate of pay may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, position offered, location, education, training, and/or experience.

Why Firstup?

Because you care - about people, the work you do, and the connections you make. Work is such a large part of life; it only makes sense to make it awesome.
If you want to engage brilliant minds in a high-growth and inclusive environment where ideas are rewarded regardless of who they come from, join us. This is a rapidly changing space so if you thrive on ambiguity, are hungry for a challenge, and have the guts to speak your mind, you could be a perfect fit.
We offer an excellent PTO program, great health benefits, a casual and friendly environment, remote work, and a leadership team who truly believes in your growth – both personally and professionally.
Firstup is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants for employment and to all employees, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, protected disability, veteran status, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state or local laws.

About the job

Apply before

Posted on

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Salary

Salary: 200k-228k USD

Experience

10 years minimum

Location requirements

Hiring timezones

United States +/- 0 hours

About Firstup

Learn more about Firstup and their company culture.

View company profile

Firstup is fundamentally changing how organizations communicate and is the backbone of the entire Digital Employee Experience. From the front line to the C-suite, we help deliver targeted information at the right time, in the right place, and in the right language. We are unifying the digital workplace and giving workers personalized access to all the systems, resources, and applications they need to do their jobs.

Joining Firstup means joining a movement to connect every worker. This movement has taken root and is evident in our world-class customer base and their millions of employees worldwide. Now we need your help. Ready to make a difference in the world.

Our Values

  • Every Employee is an Owner with responsibility and credit for our progress

  • Leadership is in our build and we see change as a catalyst for improvement

  • We win as a team, committed to help our coworkers and customers thrive

Employee benefits

Learn about the employee benefits and perks provided at Firstup.

View benefits

Disability insurance

Disability insurance so you don't have to worry.

Stock options

Every employee gets equity, so you are rewarded for your best work.

Life insurance

Life and accidental death & dismemberment insurance so you don't have to worry.

Unlimited PTO

You can’t mobilize if you don’t rest and recharge—so take as much paid time off as you need.

View Firstup's employee benefits
Claim this profileFirstup logoFI

Firstup

Company size

51-200 employees

Founded in

2008

Chief executive officer

Gary Nakamura

Employees live in

View company profile

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