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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Operations Manager

💰 $120,000 - $180,000

CloudDevOpsSREIT OperationsPlatform

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Operations Manager is a hands-on, strategic leader responsible for operating, securing, and optimizing cloud platforms and platform services at scale. This role blends people management, cloud architecture oversight, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, and operational excellence to ensure high availability, automated delivery, cost efficiency, and compliance across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP environments. The Cloud Operations Manager partners with engineering, security, product, and finance teams to define cloud governance, runbooks, observability standards, and continuous improvement programs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Cloud Engineer or Cloud Platform Engineer
  • Senior DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Infrastructure/Systems Engineering Manager

Advancement To:

  • Director of Cloud Operations / Director of Platform Engineering
  • Head of SRE / Head of Cloud Platform
  • VP of Engineering / VP of Infrastructure & Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineering Manager
  • Head of DevOps
  • Cloud Security Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own and drive the operational strategy and roadmap for cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), including reliability, scalability, security posture, cost governance, and observability across services and environments.
  • Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing cloud operations and SRE team; recruit, set clear performance goals, conduct regular 1:1s, and build career paths to improve retention and capability.
  • Design and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) patterns and pipelines (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) to ensure repeatable, auditable, and testable infrastructure provisioning across environments.
  • Define, implement and maintain CI/CD best practices and pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, ArgoCD) that enable safe, auditable, and automated application and infrastructure deployments.
  • Establish and enforce cloud governance, tagging strategies, and account/organization structure to support cost allocation, security controls, and operational visibility.
  • Create, monitor, and iterate on SLOs/SLIs/SLAs and service-level reporting; lead blameless postmortems and continuous improvement plans to reduce incident frequency and mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Build and operate robust monitoring, logging, and tracing platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch, Jaeger) to provide end-to-end observability for applications and infrastructure.
  • Drive incident management as Incident Commander when required: coordinate response, communicate status to stakeholders, manage escalations, and ensure follow-up remediation and documentation.
  • Lead cloud cost optimization initiatives including rightsizing, reserved instances/savings plans, workload placement, and tagging enforcement to meet budgetary targets and reduce waste.
  • Design and maintain resilient network architectures (VPC/VNet, subnets, transit gateways, peering, VPN/Direct Connect) to support secure, high-performance connectivity for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
  • Oversee identity and access management (IAM) models, role-based access control, and privileged access reviews to reduce blast radius and satisfy audit requirements.
  • Implement secret management and key management solutions (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS/Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, Google Secret Manager) and integrate them into deployment and runtime workflows.
  • Define and operationalize backup and disaster recovery strategies, including RTO/RPO objectives, cross-region replication, runbooks, and periodic DR testing.
  • Lead cloud migration and modernization projects: plan migration strategy, assess risks, execute migrations with minimal downtime, and validate performance and security post-migration.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks and internal security standards (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA as applicable) by partnering with security and compliance teams to close audit findings and implement controls.
  • Drive automation of repetitive operational tasks through scripting and automation frameworks (Python, Go, Bash, Ansible), and reduce toil by capturing operational knowledge into runbooks and playbooks.
  • Manage third-party cloud vendors and managed services, including contract negotiation, escalation paths, SLAs, and performance reviews to ensure value and reliability.
  • Plan capacity and perform performance tuning and scalability testing for critical systems, ensuring predictable behavior under load and during traffic spikes.
  • Maintain and enforce secure build and release practices, container security, and image scanning for Kubernetes and container platforms (EKS, AKS, GKE) and orchestrators.
  • Coordinate cross-functional release planning and change management processes to minimize operational risk and maintain traceability for production changes.
  • Develop and maintain runbooks, playbooks, and onboarding documentation for operations, incident response, and maintenance windows to support shift rotations and on-call readiness.
  • Implement and evolve policy-as-code and guardrails (OPA, AWS Config, Azure Policy, GCP Organization Policies) to automatically detect and remediate non-compliant resources.
  • Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to prioritize platform investments, translate business requirements into technical initiatives, and measure ROI of platform improvements.
  • Track and report operational KPIs and dashboards to senior leadership, finance, and stakeholders; drive transparency on uptime, incidents, cost trends, and technical debt remediation.
  • Champion security-first and reliability-first culture through training, tabletop exercises, SRE workshops, and regular internal communications.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Support cross-team initiatives for platform standardization and reusable service templates.
  • Facilitate knowledge-sharing sessions, brown-bags, and technical onboarding for new platform capabilities.
  • Assist in preparing materials and evidence for external and internal cloud audits.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience with public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) including services for compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed databases.
  • Infrastructure as Code tooling expertise (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) and module/pattern design for multi-account environments.
  • Strong container orchestration and platform skills (Kubernetes, EKS, AKS, GKE) including cluster lifecycle, autoscaling, RBAC, and CNI networking.
  • CI/CD and release automation proficiency (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) and GitOps practices.
  • Observability and telemetry platform experience (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch, Jaeger) for metrics, traces, and logs.
  • Scripting and automation (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell) to automate operational tasks and build tooling.
  • Networking and security fundamentals (VPC, VPN, firewalls, NAT, security groups, WAF, NSGs) in cloud contexts.
  • Identity and access management: IAM policies, role management, SSO integration (Okta, Azure AD), and secrets management (Vault, Secrets Manager).
  • Cost management and financial tooling (Cost Explorer, CloudHealth, FinOps practices) for tracking, forecasting, and optimization.
  • Disaster recovery, backup solutions, and business continuity planning for cloud-native and hybrid systems.
  • Configuration management and automation frameworks (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) when applicable.
  • Experience with compliance and security frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA) and remediation lifecycle.
  • Monitoring and incident response tooling (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps) and on-call rotation management.
  • Database operational experience (managed RDS/Cloud SQL, NoSQL, caching strategies) and performance tuning.
  • Familiarity with policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Cloud Custodian, AWS Config) and automated governance.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people management skills with experience developing engineers and technical leads.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate technical signals into business impact for executives and stakeholders.
  • Proven incident commander temperament: calm under pressure, decisive, accountable, and experienced in post-incident analysis.
  • Strategic thinker with bias for action and ability to prioritize technical debt, reliability improvements, and feature delivery.
  • Effective cross-functional collaborator: works well with Product, Engineering, Security, Finance, and Customer Success.
  • Vendor management and negotiation skills to manage SLAs and third-party relationships.
  • Coaching and mentoring mindset: builds teams through feedback, training, and empowerment.
  • Strong problem-solving and root-cause analysis skills with data-driven decision making.
  • Project management skills: able to deliver complex multi-team projects on time and within budget.
  • Continuous improvement mindset with a focus on automation, efficiency, and measurable outcomes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, MBA, or related field.
  • Professional certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect/DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or ITIL/SRE certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Software Engineering
  • Network Engineering
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5–12+ years in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE roles with at least 2–4 years of people leadership or technical leadership experience.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years operating production cloud platforms, multi-cloud exposure (AWS/Azure/GCP), and demonstrable experience leading operations and reliability teams at scale.
  • Track record of driving automation, reducing operational toil, and delivering measurable cost and reliability improvements.
  • Experience with compliance audits, security remediation, and enterprise governance at scale.
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