Executive Director, Site Reliability and Cloud Platform Strategy

Our client is a well-established Chicago financial services organization operating in one of the most heavily regulated environments in the industry. The platform engineering organization supports mission-critical systems where stability is not negotiable and every architectural decision carries regulatory weight. To protect the confidentiality of this search, additional details will be shared with qualified candidates as the process progresses. About the Role This is an executive seat with four distinct areas of ownership: Site Reliability Engineering, platform governance and compliance, cloud strategy and architecture, and metrics and reporting. The leader in this role scales a maturing SRE practice, sets cloud architectural standards and multi-year strategy, and serves as product manager for the FinOps and SecOps domains. They also own platform engineering's compliance obligations across incidents, risks, and audit findings. The client is looking for someone with real technical credibility who can also sit in front of executives and translate architectural trade-offs into business decisions. Responsibilities Site Reliability Engineering Scale and mature the SRE practice, establishing error budgets, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response frameworks across all platform services Define and enforce reliability standards including on-call models, blameless postmortem processes, and corrective action tracking Partner with platform foundation teams across Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps, and Security to embed reliability into build and operate models Drive toil reduction through automation so engineering capacity moves from manual operations to higher-value platform work Governance and Compliance Serve as product manager for the FinOps and SecOps domains, owning product vision, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment for governance tooling Build and maintain a governance framework covering incident and problem management, risk tracking, and audit findings Own the end-to-end process for compliance obligations, driving timely resolution and clear accountability Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Security to identify governance gaps and drive remediation Report on compliance posture to senior leadership, surfacing trends, aging items, and residual risk Cloud Strategy and Architecture Define and execute the multi-year cloud architecture strategy against growth, scalability, regulatory, and cost objectives Establish cloud architectural standards, reference architectures, and governance frameworks covering landing zones, identity, network patterns, and service catalog Guide decisions on containers and orchestration, IaaS and PaaS adoption, disaster recovery, and multi-region patterns against regulatory requirements including CIS and NIST Own technology roadmaps and end-of-life planning for cloud platform components Serve as a key technical advisor to senior leadership Metrics and Reporting Own the platform metrics function, building a consistent framework for measuring platform health, engineering velocity, reliability, and cost efficiency Define and track KPIs aligned to internal SLAs, executive reporting, and audit requirements Ensure platform tooling is the single source of truth for work visibility Build reporting cadences including platform health scorecards, capacity forecasting, and risk transparency Delivery and Leadership Serve as the primary engineering leadership partner to platform program management, ensuring initiatives are scoped, sequenced, and resourced Align engineering capacity to roadmap commitments and surface dependency risks early Lead, develop, and retain a team of engineering managers and senior individual contributors Manage budget, schedules, and performance for areas of responsibility Oversee remediation of audit findings, ensuring root cause is addressed and residual risk is reduced Qualifications 15+ years in cloud engineering, platform reliability, or infrastructure, with at least 5 years in senior engineering leadership Executive-level leadership of SRE, cloud engineering, or platform reliability organizations in a regulated industry Proven ability to build and scale SRE practices including SLO and SLA frameworks, on-call models, error budgets, and incident response Deep expertise in cloud architecture strategy and governance, including enterprise-wide architectural standards Experience serving as product manager for technical domains such as FinOps, SecOps, or platform tooling Experience establishing governance and compliance frameworks within a platform or infrastructure organization Ability to design metrics and reporting frameworks for both technical and executive audiences Strong track record partnering with program and product management to turn platform capability into delivery-ready roadmaps Exceptional written and verbal communication Experience leading in Agile and Scrum environments Bachelor's degree, preferably in a technical discipline, or equivalent experience Preferred Skills "Financial services" or similarly regulated industry experience with exposure to CIS, NIST, and related frameworks Experience in production change control and working directly with audit and compliance functions Technical Skills Deep knowledge of SRE tooling and observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, or Datadog Expert-level knowledge of AWS, Azure, or GCP, with multi-cloud or hybrid experience preferred Strong working knowledge of cloud-native architecture patterns and Infrastructure as Code Familiarity with Kubernetes, Kafka, and CI/CD tooling such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins Working knowledge of FinOps principles and cloud cost governance at organizational scale Familiarity with SecOps tooling and cloud security governance GRC tooling experience such as ServiceNow or Archer preferred Certifications AWS Solutions Architect Associate or higher strongly desired Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, or equivalent preferred #J-18808-Ljbffr Crucial Hire