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

Senior Director, Cloud Operations

Onsite, Santa Clara, CA

We at Nile envision an enterprise network that inherently defends against cyber threats, eliminates lateral attack vectors like ransomware, and operates free of complexity. Our goal is to deliver Campus Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) that makes network operations virtually invisible to our customers by pushing the boundaries of autonomy. Imagine a network that continuously monitors, optimizes, and upgrades itself—all without the need for human intervention. Our audacious journey began in 2018 when we brought together a team of industry veterans and visionaries in networking, cybersecurity, cloud software, and AI to disrupt a $100 billion enterprise networking market, starting with the wired and wireless LAN. Today, our Nile Access Service is redefining connectivity as a service for organizations worldwide, from cutting-edge technology companies to leading healthcare and financial institutions, and beyond.

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.