Vice President, Cloud Operations

Job Description

Job Description

Position Overview

WatchGuard is seeking an experienced Vice President of Cloud Operations to lead our global cloud and infrastructure operations organization. This executive will be accountable for the reliability, scalability, security, operational efficiency, and cost effectiveness of the platforms supporting our business and SaaS products.

The ideal candidate has led cloud and hybrid environments at global scale within a SaaS or cloud-based software company. This leader will partner closely with Product, R&D, Finance, Security, and business leadership to scale our platforms, improve customer experience, and strengthen cloud unit economics.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud & Global Operations
•Lead global Cloud Operations, infrastructure, platform operations, and related capabilities across cloud and hybrid environments.
•Ensure platforms are highly available, resilient, secure, scalable, and cost effective.
•Establish strong practices for service levels, observability, incident management, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
•Drive automation and engineering-led operations to reduce manual work and operational risk.

SaaS, Product & R&D Partnership
•Serve as the senior Cloud Operations partner to Product and R&D leaders, aligning infrastructure strategy with product roadmaps and business priorities.
•Influence architecture and product decisions so scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency are designed into products.
•Define operational and economic metrics for cloud-based products and services.

FinOps & COGS Optimization
•Own and mature the FinOps strategy and operating model, creating accountability for cloud consumption and product economics.
•Develop product-level infrastructure cost, COGS, and unit-cost visibility.
•Partner with Product, R&D, and Finance to set cost targets and execute optimization roadmaps.
•Improve gross margins through architecture, capacity, cloud commitments, storage, compute, networking, licensing, and process optimization without compromising customer experience.

Global Leadership, M&A & Transformation
•Lead and develop a globally distributed organization with clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and effective collaboration across regions and time zones.
•Attract, develop, and retain strong cloud, platform, infrastructure, and FinOps talent.
•Lead Cloud Operations activities for mergers and acquisitions, including assessment, integration planning, platform consolidation, and cost optimization.
•Drive modernization, standardization, and simplification while reducing technical debt and operational complexity.

Strategy & Executive Leadership
•Develop and execute a multi-year Cloud Operations strategy aligned with WatchGuard’s product and business strategy.
•Manage cloud and infrastructure budgets with strong forecasting, capacity planning, and investment discipline.
•Provide executive visibility into reliability, operational risk, cloud consumption, COGS, capacity, and investment needs.
•Partner with the CIO and technology leadership team on broader transformation priorities.

Qualifications:
Required
• Significant leadership experience in Cloud Operations, Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or
Infrastructure Operations, including global teams.
• Prior leadership experience in a SaaS or cloud-based software company is critical.
• Deep experience operating large-scale public cloud environments, preferably AWS and/or Microsoft Azure, along with
hybrid infrastructure.
• Strong experience with FinOps, cloud financial management, COGS optimization, and product-level cloud economics.
• Proven ability to partner with senior Product and R&D/Engineering leaders and influence architecture decisions.
• Experience managing infrastructure budgets and delivering measurable cost and efficiency outcomes.
• Experience supporting technology integration through M&A.
• Strong knowledge of cloud architecture, SRE, DevOps, observability, automation, reliability engineering, disaster
recovery, and operational security.
• Strong business acumen, executive communication, and stakeholder-management skills.
Preferred
• Experience supporting cybersecurity or other mission-critical SaaS products.
• Experience implementing product cost allocation, unit economics, forecasting, and cloud cost targets.
• Experience transforming traditional infrastructure organizations toward cloud-native, SRE, platform engineering, and
automation-driven models.
• Experience integrating geographically distributed teams and platforms following acquisitions.
Leadership Profile
• Technology executive and business operator who connects platform decisions to customer experience, growth, and
gross margin.
• Credible partner to architects and engineers who can also communicate technology economics and risk to executives.
• Collaborative leader with a strong bias toward accountability, automation, simplification, standardization, and
continuous improvement.
• Experienced change leader who can guide the organization through growth, transformation, and acquisitions.

What Success Looks Like
• Reliable scaling of WatchGuard’s SaaS platforms as the business grows.
• Clear product-level visibility and accountability for cloud COGS and unit costs.
• Improved cloud efficiency and SaaS gross-margin economics.
• Stronger partnership among Cloud Operations, Product, R&D, Finance, and Security.
• A high-performing global organization with increased automation and reduced operational complexity.

Location: The preferred location is Miami, can also be in the Seattle office (both onsite)

Salary, plus bonus and comprehensive benefits. 

Why Work for WatchGuard?

WatchGuard is a global leader in network security and intelligence, advanced endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication, and secure Wi-Fi. Our award-winning products and services are trusted worldwide by more than 18,000 security resellers and service providers to protect more than 250,000 customers. Our technology keeps our customers ahead of increasingly sophisticated hackers and has fueled record revenues at WatchGuard.

WatchGuard is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with team members working remotely and in offices worldwide.

Our company culture places an intense focus on our customers and employees. From the newest employee to our CEO, you'll find that each person at WatchGuard embodies our Core Values: Accountability, Community, Belonging, Action, Innovation, and Customer-Centric. Learn more about our company culture at -careers.

WatchGuard provides equal employment opportunities for all qualified employees, regardless of their race, color, national origin, religion, ancestry, creed, pregnancy, age, sex, sexual orientation (including gender expression or identity), marital status, mental or physical disability, honorably discharged veteran or military status or any other category protected by federal, state or local laws. Our equal employment opportunity (or EEO) policy focuses solely on the talent, hard work, contributions, and actual results achieved by each WatchGuard employee and on the potential of employment candidates to make such contributions. We consider focusing on an employee's protected characteristics rather than on talent, hard work, and actual work results to violate our EEO policy. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we are committed to a diverse workforce. WatchGuard participates in E-verify.

WatchGuard is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. Please let us know if you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.