Sr Director, Platform & Technology Operations (Breakthrough)

Senior Director, Platform And Technology Operations

The Senior Director, Platform and Technology Operations, owns the infrastructure, reliability, and operational excellence of Breakthrough's technology platform. This role is accountable for cloud operations, production environments, data platform infrastructure, security, compliance, and internal technical support.This leader makes sure our platform runs reliably and scales to support 200+ Fortune 500 clients. They own cloud infrastructure, production environment health, monitoring and observability, incident management, and the maturity of our security and compliance programs. They lead client-facing security engagements and manage vendor relationships across the operational toolchain.This is a working leadership role with a lean team. Technically credible enough to challenge and develop the leaders on the team, while focused on making the overall operational function work: setting strategy, building repeatable processes, and raising the capabilities of the people and systems across the group.The ideal location for this role is on-site in Green Bay, WI, however, based on relevancy of experience, we may consider candidates within a drivable distance from Green Bay in which monthly travel at a minimum would be required.

Job Responsibilities

Infrastructure & Cloud Operations

• Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of cloud infrastructure (GCP)
• Manage production and staging environments, ensuring stability and availability
• Own the monitoring and observability stack: logging, tracing, metrics, and alerting
• Drive proactive capacity planning to stay ahead of demand as the client base and platform grow
• Own data platform infrastructure (BigQuery, data pipelines) and the compute/platform layer supporting ML and AI workloads
• Drive infrastructure architecture decisions in partnership with engineering leadership
• Drive SLA/SLO definition, measurement, and reporting
• Own the incident management framework: tooling, severity definitions, post-mortem process, and escalation to business continuity activation, leadership notification, and client communication
• Own disaster recovery and business continuity planning

Security & Compliance Operations

• Own and evolve Breakthrough's security and compliance programs, including SOC 2, with a mandate to continuously expand the framework portfolio as client and market needs require
• Continuously mature the organization's security posture: policies, controls, risk management, vulnerability management, access controls, and network security, independent of any single compliance framework
• Own multi-tenant data isolation, client data handling policies, and data retention and governance practices
• Lead client-facing security questionnaires, audits, and due diligence processes
• Partner with U.S. Venture's corporate information security team to align on corporate policies, share intelligence, and coordinate security initiatives

Internal Technical Support

• Oversee the Help Desk function, ensuring internal teams have the tools and support they need to be productive
• Own internal IT operations, endpoint management, and end-user experience

Vendor & Budget Management

• Manage vendor relationships for cloud services (GCP), security tooling, and operational platforms
• Own contract negotiations and renewals for tooling within the operational domain
• Drive cloud cost optimization and FinOps discipline

Competencies

Technical

• Cloud infrastructure architecture and operations (GCP preferred)
• Production environment management, monitoring, and observability tooling
• Data platform infrastructure and familiarity with modern data and AI/ML operational patterns
• Network security, identity and access management, and vulnerability management
• Disaster recovery and business continuity planning
• Cloud-native architectures and infrastructure-as-code

Business & Operational

• Compliance program management and framework evaluation
• Data governance and multi-tenant data management practices
• Vendor and contract management
• Budget management and cloud cost optimization
• Client-facing communication on security and compliance topics
• Risk assessment and mitigation

Behavioral

• Leads through the team rather than around them: sets direction, removes obstacles, and develops leaders rather than doing their work for them
• Communicates complex technical and compliance topics clearly to non-technical stakeholders and clients
• Builds repeatable processes rather than relying on heroics
• Track record of growing technical leaders, not just managing them
• Works across organizational boundaries with engineering, product, enterprise integrations, and corporate infosec

Additional Job Responsibilities

• Cultivate U.S. Venture's values while inspiring, empowering, recognizing, and guiding team members
• Live our values of High Performance, Caring Relationships, Strategic Foresight, and Entrepreneurial Spirit
• Find A Better Way by championing continuous improvement and quality control efforts to identify opportunities to innovate and improve efficiency, accuracy, and standardization
• Continuously learn and develop self professionally
• Support corporate efforts for safety, government compliance, and all other company policies & procedures
• Perform other related duties as required and assigned

Qualifications

Required

• 8+ years in technology operations, infrastructure, or cloud engineering, with at least 3 years leading teams that include Director-level or senior technical reports
• Track record managing cloud infrastructure at scale (GCP preferred)
• Experience with enterprise compliance frameworks, particularly SOC 2. Familiarity with NIST is a plus; exposure to ISO 27001, FedRAMP, or GDPR is a bonus.
• Experience leading client-facing security and compliance conversations with enterprise customers
• Background in SaaS or technology companies serving regulated or enterprise clients