VP-Cloud Engineering & AI Platforms

Lead the strategy, planning, and delivery of the organization's cloud, AI, advanced analytics and DevOps capabilities. Create innovative strategy and vision, provide clear and effective direction, champion standards, and lead the department's efforts ensuring optimization, alignment, and successful execution of organizational objectives. Utilize expertise of industry principles, standards, and best practices to efficiently drive delivery of world class technologies meeting scalability, performance, security, quality and reliability objectives.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and develop a highly effective technical organization with required skills and structure to meet current and future business needs. Drive quality, efficiency, and positive organizational energy through effective hiring, mentoring, career planning, talent management and employee engagement initiatives. Provide frequent and effective communication to staff ensuring understanding and alignment to the organization's/department's key priorities and objectives, and deliverables.

• Employ technical, market and industry expertise to influence business strategy based on technology needs/vision (ideate and demonstrate how technology can support and drive the organization). Translate business needs and strategy into short and long-term technology strategies. Drive said strategies by providing vision, leadership and innovation to technology delivery teams.

• Lead the annual budget and financial planning process for assigned organization and technical assets that include, but are not limited to, cost/benefit estimates on proposed projects, prioritization of projects, and investment decisions based on return on investment, criticality, and business strategy/need. Manage various technology delivery and business unit budgets while ensuring that the business maximizes value from dollars expended on resources (people, projects, applications and infrastructure).

• Develop and drive a resource modeling strategy to effectively balance the use of employees, contractors, and vendor partners to maximize efficiency, technical capability, cost, and quality of the organization and its technical assets. Address talent challenges by modifying said strategy as needed. Pro-actively collaborates with procurement to execute and analyze resource strategy. Partner with vendors to drive quality and contract compliance while participating in the negotiation process as needed.

• Fully engage with technology leadership and business partners to address business/customer needs through technology as appropriate. Employ business and technology acumen to translate technical details into business terms and vice versa, assure mutual understanding and agreement of technology objectives/deliverables by all affected constituencies. Foster strong working relationships across the organization and within technology to drive technology delivery strategy and goals.

• Provide oversight of technology delivery activities, ensuring schedule, scope, cost and system performance targets/goals are met. Act as a single technology point of contact for business partners. Escalate, address and communicate issues, as appropriate, with technology and business leaders to achieve timely resolution. Address and communicate impact of production incidents to ensure root cause is determined and permanent solutions are documented and implemented.

• Act as a change agent by maintaining up-to-date knowledge of industry advances and developments to be incorporated into and improve project life cycles, technology function and business capabilities. Institutionalize process/service management and quality practices to drive efficiency and standards within the organization. Champion and contribute to continuous improvement best practices through rigorous gap analysis and solution ideation and implementation to increase effectiveness of the organization.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors degree or equivalent (4-years) of experience.

• 10+ years of relevant work experience required.

• Demonstrated ability to deliver cloud solutions of increasing scope, complexity, visibility and criticality on time and within budget through both vendor (on- and off-shore) and employee resources.

• Proven success in partnering with the business to identify and prioritize solutions to optimize service, support and operational efficiency/effectiveness: thought leader and innovator in using technology to move the business forward. 

• Highly effective communication skills that includes the ability to translate technical information to non-technical audiences and vice versa.

• 6-8+ years of people leadership experience, including success in leading technical teams and executing techn