Vice President, Cloud Operations and IT

Base Salary: $225,000 - $250,000

Who we are:

This position is hybrid if local to our office in Alpharetta, GA or Scottsdale, AZ.

Alpharetta, GA - 1125 Sanctuary Parkway, Ste 220, Alpharetta, GA 30009

Scottsdale, AZ - 18700 N. Hayden Rd, Ste 230, Scottsdale, AZ 85255

What you will be doing:

The Vice President, Cloud Operations and IT owns the health of Illumia’s UAT and production environments across Azure and AWS and leads the teams that run our cloud platforms and internal technology. Our platforms support higher education, healthcare and other campus environments, where they process payments, manage credentials and hold sensitive personal data. When our clients’ people cannot pay, enter a building or reach the services they rely on, they notice immediately.

This role leads an organization of about 50 people, including contract partners, in the United States, Ireland and India. Through four directors, the Vice President oversees cloud operations, cloud applications, site reliability, database administration and internal IT, and is accountable for uptime, incident response, change discipline, cloud cost and the operational side of our security and compliance commitments. The role also decides how far and how fast we let AI take on the work of monitoring, diagnosing and fixing production.

Key Responsibilities:

Owns availability, performance and resilience of every environment our clients and our own teams depend on, with clear service level objectives that the role helps define, publishes and reports against

• Owns incident management and change management end to end: how we detect, respond, communicate, learn and prevent, and how we approve and release change without slowing the business down
• Manages cloud spend as an operating discipline, including the operating budget and the cloud portion of cost of revenue, with unit economics and forecasting that Finance and Product can trust
• Facilitates capacity planning, disaster recovery and resilience testing, and makes the business case for investment where reliability requires it
• Directs application operations and database administration for the cloud platforms, including availability, performance, backup and recovery
• Partners with the Chief Information Security Officer, who sets policy, selects tooling and accepts risk, to make controls true in production, remediate findings on schedule and produce audit evidence for SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA, FERPA and client security reviews
• Leads Illumia’s internal IT (employee laptops and standard productivity applications, email, the corporate network and the service desk), setting service expectations and holding it to the same standards of reliability and cost as production
• Determines, with Information Security, where and how AI may monitor, diagnose and fix production systems, and sets the guardrails, permissions, audit trail and measures of results for that work
• Leads, develops and holds accountable a distributed team of managers and directors, building a bench for the future

What Success Looks Like

• Within 90 days, has learned the platform, met key internal stakeholders and high-profile clients, and published a baseline of reliability, incident, change and cost measures that everyone agrees on
• By six months, has delivered a reliability and cost plan with named owners, a clear division of responsibility with Security and Architecture, and visible movement on alert noise and recovery times
• By the end of the first year, has shown measurable improvement against that baseline, an audit cycle that runs on automated evidence instead of scrambles, and at least one AI assisted operations capability in production with documented guardrails, an audit trail and results
• In internal IT, has put clear service measures in place for the service desk, endpoints and network, and built a working relationship with Information Security on standards

Who you will work with:

Reports directly to the Chief Technology Officer. This role works daily with the leaders of Product Development, Architecture, Information Security and Corporate IT, and with the directors of Cloud Operations, Cloud Applications, Site Reliability and Database Administration. Architecture sets reference patterns and standards, and this role operates to them. Information Security owns policy and risk acceptance, and has authority to stop a release on a control failure. There are also working relationships with Finance and with key clients, auditors and assessors.

What you will bring:

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• 15+ years of experience in technology operations, including 5+ years leading operations or site reliability organizations in a multi-tenant SaaS or cloud product company (10 years may be considered for an exceptional candidate)
• Experience running production on Azure and AWS at meaningful scale, including incident leadership, change governance, disaster recovery planning and cloud cost management
• Record of leading managers and directors, including contract partners, across time zones, building a bench and holding a high bar for accountability while keeping on call sustainable
• Working fluency with SOC 2 and PCI DSS in a regulated environment, including comfort working with auditors, assessors and client security teams
• Technical credibility with engineers, including the ability to engage in outage reviews at the technical level
• Working knowledge of observability, automation and AI assisted operations, and the controls they require
• Direct experience overseeing internal IT services, or the judgment to lead a seasoned IT leader and hold that function to clear service measures
• Accountability, collaboration, clear communication with senior leaders and sound judgment under pressure

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience applying AI in production operations (for example, agent assisted investigation, anomaly detection or automated remediation under human approval), including how permissions, guardrails, audit and results were handled
• Experience in payments, healthcare or education technology
• Experience integrating acquired companies

Essential Functions of the job:

The duties and responsibilities described in this job description are intended to represent the essential functions of the position as defined under applicable federal, state, and local labor laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). These functions are the fundamental job duties required for successful performance.

Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions unless such accommodation imposes an undue hardship on the organization.

What is good to know:

Some travel is required, estimated at up to 15%. This role is expected to be available outside normal business hours for major incidents and escalations.

The work is primarily in an office environment and involves extensive computer use, with periods of sitting and occasional standing, walking and lifting up to 10 pounds.

Competencies and Behaviors

• Humble: The right leaders for Illumia don’t need to own the spotlight. They share credit, define success collectively, and are quick to elevate the contributions of others. This is a company that still writes its story. The leaders who thrive here find energy in building something together, not in being recognized as the smartest person in the room.
• Hungry: We are not looking for caretakers. We are looking for leaders who are restless about what’s possible, self-motivated to close the gap between where we are today and where we need to be, and who are already thinking about the next opportunity before anyone asks.
• Smart: At Illumia, our leaders must operate across a complex, distributed organization spanning multiple product lines, two legacy cultures, and thousands of clients with competing priorities. Technical skills matter, but the ability to read a room, build trust across functions, and bring people along is what separates a great leader from one who burns the organization out.

What you get when you join our team:

Base salary offers for this position may vary based on factors such as location, skills, and relevant experience. Some positions may include additional compensation in the form of bonus, equity, or commissions.