Associate Director, Cloud Engineering

We are looking for a strategic and technically grounded leader to join our infrastructure leadership team as Associate Director of Cloud Engineering. In this role, you will lead multiple cloud engineering teams—including Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), Systems Development Engineers (SDEs), and platform teams—focused on building and scaling resilient, secure, and cost-optimized cloud-native platforms.As a step up from manager, this role requires you to operate at both strategic and execution levels—mentoring engineering managers, setting technical direction, and driving alignment across engineering, product, and security. You’ll own initiatives that improve system scalability, incident resilience, platform modernization, and FinOps maturity, while championing operational excellence and AWS best practices.
Key ResponsibilitiesTeam & Organizational Leadership- Lead and mentor multiple teams (including direct managers and senior ICs) across SRE, cloud infrastructure, and platform engineering functions.- Develop organizational structures and hiring strategies to scale engineering talent in alignment with company growth.Promote a high-performance, inclusive engineering culture grounded in ownership, trust, and continuous learning.Ensure the career development of team leads and senior engineers through coaching, feedback, and structured development plans.Technical Strategy & ExecutionDrive multi-team initiatives to deliver scalable, secure, and cost-efficient infrastructure leveraging AWS-native and serverless technologies (Lambda, ECS, EKS, Step Functions, etc.).Lead the definition and execution of infrastructure platform roadmaps aligned with application needs, compliance requirements, and growth objectives.Balance the delivery of short-term outcomes with long-term architectural evolution.Incident & Issue Management at ScaleOversee high-severity incident response and guide postmortem analysis with a focus on systemic prevention.Institutionalize best practices in observability, SLOs/SLIs, and operational maturity across all teams.Champion resilience engineering, capacity planning, and infrastructure fault tolerance.FinOps, Governance & Cross-Functional LeadershipDrive adoption of FinOps practices, enforce cost tagging, and partner with finance and product teams on budgeting and forecasting.Collaborate with Security, Compliance, and Engineering leadership to ensure cloud governance, policy enforcement, and audit readiness.Lead cross-functional technical working groups and represent cloud engineering in broader architecture and infrastructure forums.

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or SRE, with at least 3 years in people leadership roles.
• Experience with Agile Software Development methodology, with expertise in Scrum Management
• Proven track record of leading multiple engineering teams in a production AWS environment.
• Expertise in cloud-native architectures, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation), and CI/CD automation.
• Experience scaling systems and leading incident management processes for production services.
• Strong understanding of FinOps principles, cloud billing, and cost control strategies.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills; capable of working with executive stakeholders and deeply technical teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS certifications (e.g., Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer).
• Experience managing managers or senior technical leaders in a fast-paced environment.
• Familiarity with SRE principles, SLAs/SLIs/SLOs, and large-scale observability practices.
• Product Ownership/Project Management experience
• Background in regulatory environments (SOC2, PCI, HIPAA) and security controls in the cloud.
• Experience with modernization efforts (e.g., lift-and-shift to serverless or containerized workloads).

At Model N we offer fair, equitable and competitive salary ranges for all positions. Compensation varies depending on factors that may include a candidate’s relevant experience, education and/or certifications, location, training, and other skills.  Additionally, Model N offers a robust total rewards package that supports individuals to be their best and protects the well-being of participating dependents. Such benefits include medical, dental, vision, health savings, flexible savings, commuter benefits, matching 401K, PTO, VTO, life insurance, pet insurance, employee assistance programs, mental health programs, charitable giving, coaching, career growth and much more.  The base salary for this position will be $160,000 - $182,000.  If your salary expectations are outside of this range, feel free to apply and discuss your expectations with our recruiters.  We are constantly opening up new positions and you might m