Associate Director, Cloud and Infrastructure Operations

Job Description

Job Description

A growing global pharmaceutical company is hiring an Associate Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Operations for the Americas region. This is a high-visibility role supporting cloud, data center, infrastructure operations, and infrastructure engineering across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

The organization is continuing to modernize its infrastructure environment, with a strong emphasis on cloud adoption, hybrid infrastructure, operational resiliency, scalable enterprise platforms, and stronger alignment between regional execution and global IT strategy. This role will be important in helping the Americas region support business-critical infrastructure while also contributing to broader cloud modernization and operational maturity efforts.

This is a strong opportunity for someone who enjoys working across both strategy and execution. The role will support AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, data center services, cloud migration, infrastructure modernization, vendor management, budget ownership, and partner-led delivery models. It is not a pure management role, and it is not a purely hands-off architecture role. The company needs someone who can provide senior technical leadership, guide delivery teams, challenge vendors, manage costs, and stay close enough to the work to ensure strong execution.

While there are no direct reports currently assigned to this role, the position will lead and coordinate a large ecosystem of outsourced partners, consultants, and offshore resources. The role will also play an important part in helping the company build operational and engineering capability through its Global Capability Center model.

This is a direct hire role based in Clifton, NJ with a hybrid schedule of three days per week onsite.

The Role You'll Play

The Associate Director, Infrastructure and Cloud Operations, will be responsible for leading cloud and data center services across the Americas region. This person will partner closely with global infrastructure leadership, regional IT leaders, security, application teams, vendors, and managed service partners to ensure the company's cloud and infrastructure environment is reliable, scalable, secure, and aligned with global strategy.

This role owns both operational and engineering responsibilities for infrastructure services across the region. It requires a strong technical foundation in AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, data center operations, automation, and cloud-native infrastructure, along with the leadership ability to manage vendors, budgets, contracts, service delivery, and large partner teams.

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead cloud and data center infrastructure operations across the Americas region, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, with responsibility for AWS, Azure, hybrid cloud, and on-premise data center environments.

• Partner with the Global Cloud and Data Center Lead on regional infrastructure strategy, cloud modernization, operational execution, roadmap planning, and alignment with global standards.

• Drive the transition from on-premise infrastructure toward scalable cloud-native, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud solutions, including migration planning, infrastructure modernization, and technical architecture guidance for AWS and Azure build solutions.

• Support infrastructure needs tied to enterprise applications, analytics, big data, machine learning, and other business-critical platforms, ensuring services are designed for availability, resiliency, performance, scalability, security, and compliance.

• Oversee regional infrastructure operations across US data center locations and drive operational excellence in incident, problem, change, service delivery, monitoring, documentation, runbooks, and continuous improvement.

• Lead and coordinate outsourced partners, consultants, managed service providers, and offshore teams, setting clear expectations around service delivery, accountability, documentation, and performance.

• Help mature operational and engineering capabilities through the company's Global Capability Center model.

• Manage cloud and infrastructure budgets, forecasting, procurement, vendor agreements, contract renewals, maintenance agreements, software, hardware, service contracts, cloud spend, and delivery cost estimates.

• Partner with IT Security, compliance, architecture, application teams, and global infrastructure teams to ensure infrastructure solutions meet enterprise, regulatory, privacy, audit, GDPR, and security requirements, while communicating priorities, risks, project status, performance, and roadmap recommendations to leadership.

Background Profile:

The ideal candidate is a strong cloud and infrastructure leader who has grown through hands-on technical roles and can still go deep when needed. This is not a pure people management role and not a pure strategy role. The company needs someone who can provide technical oversight, make architecture decisions, manage partners, drive execution, and still understand the details well enough to challenge vendors and guide delivery teams.

The right person will likely come from a similar-size enterprise environment with a lean IT operating model, heavy use of outsourced/offshore partners, and a need for both strategic planning and hands-on technical leadership. This person should be comfortable operating with visibility across regional and global leadership while also staying grounded in practical infrastructure delivery.

• 8+ years of progressive IT infrastructure experience, including 3+ years in a cloud architect or senior cloud infrastructure architecture capacity.

• 2+ years of technical leadership experience, which may include leadership of offshore teams, outsourced partners, consultants, project teams, or direct reports.

• Strong hands-on experience with AWS, along with experience supporting Azure, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and cloud infrastructure build solutions.

• Experience designing, building, supporting, and modernizing infrastructure across cloud, data center, compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, automation, and enterprise operations.

• Experience planning or executing migrations from on-premise systems to cloud-native or cloud-based solutions.

• Experience supporting infrastructure services in complex, multi-site enterprise environments with large user populations and partner or consultant ecosystems.

• Ability to manage both infrastructure engineering and operations responsibilities, including incident management, service delivery, technical execution, and operational improvement.

• Experience leading vendors, managed service providers, consultants, and outsourced partner teams.

• Strong understanding of infrastructure cost management, cloud spend, budget forecasting, contract renewals, procurement, vendor agreements, and delivery cost estimation.

• Strong project management, communication, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to lead infrastructure initiatives across regional leadership, global IT, technical teams, security, and business stakeholders.

Preferred experience and skills:

• Experience in pharmaceutical, biotech, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, or another regulated environment, including exposure to GDPR, GxP, audit requirements, privacy, or regulated infrastructure controls.

• Experience supporting big data, machine learning, analytics, advanced cloud-based data platforms, or other emerging infrastructure needs.

• Experience helping build or mature a Global Capability Center, offshore delivery model, shared services model, or global IT operating structure.

• Experience in a lean enterprise IT environment where the role requires both senior-level oversight and hands-on technical involvement.

• Experience with scripting, automation, infrastructure as code, cloud governance, cloud security, and operational monitoring, including tools or languages such as Python, Perl, or shell scripting.