Senior Program Manager - Cloud Operations

Position Summary

The Senior Program Manager for Cloud Operations is the connective tissue between our scrum teams, application teams, and leadership. This role owns the continuous improvement agenda for the Cloud Operations organization - translating leadership strategy into prioritized, sequenced work for delivery teams, and translating delivery reality back into decisions leadership can act on.

This is not a ticket-tracking role. The person in this seat is expected to identify where operational friction is costing the organization time, money, or reliability, and then drive the cross-functional programs that remove it. Success looks like fewer surprises, clearer priorities, faster cycle times, and stakeholders who trust the operating rhythm.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Partner with Cloud Operations leadership to define and maintain a prioritized program roadmap that reflects business objectives, capacity, and risk.
• Facilitate intake and prioritization across competing demands from application teams, security, compliance, and infrastructure stakeholders.
• Maintain a single, authoritative view of in-flight and upcoming work, with clear ownership, dependencies, and target dates.
• Escalate and resolve priority conflicts before they become delivery problems; make trade-offs explicit rather than implicit.
• Translate complex business and technical requirements into actionable cloud transformation roadmaps and architectural guidance.

Process Improvement

• Assess current cloud operations processes - incident, change, request, escalation, and on-call workflows - and identify measurable improvement opportunities.
• Lead process improvement initiatives end to end: current-state analysis, target-state design, stakeholder buy-in, rollout, and adoption tracking.
• Partner with engineering to identify and champion automation opportunities that reduce manual toil and shorten response and fulfillment times.
• Champion DevOps best practices across infrastructure and delivery teams, driving adoption of automated CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Implement and maintain robust cloud and infrastructure observability strategies for distributed systems to enable proactive issue resolution, automated monitoring, and high availability.
• Define and document standard operating procedures, runbooks, and intake paths so that repeatable work is actually repeatable.
• Establish metrics for operational health (cycle time, MTTR, backlog aging, change success rate, toil hours reclaimed) and drive accountability against them.

Cross-Team Alignment and Stakeholder Management

• Work embedded with scrum teams - attending ceremonies as needed, clarifying scope, removing blockers, and ensuring operational requirements are represented in sprint planning.
• Serve as the primary interface between Cloud Operations and application teams, ensuring dependencies, service expectations, and handoffs are understood on both sides.
• Build and maintain executive-level reporting: program status, risks, decisions needed, and outcomes delivered - communicated in the language leadership uses.
• Facilitate steering committees, working sessions, and post-incident or retrospective reviews that produce decisions and owners, not just discussion.
• Proactively surface risks, resourcing gaps, and misalignment early, with recommended options rather than open-ended problems.

Program Governance and Delivery

• Own program plans, milestones, RAID logs (risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies), and change control across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Track and report on benefits realization - connect completed work back to the operational or financial outcome it was meant to produce.
• Ensure programs meet applicable security, compliance, audit, and change management requirements.
• Manage vendor and partner engagements supporting cloud operations programs where applicable.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of program or project management experience, including 3+ years managing complex, cross-functional technology programs.
• Demonstrated experience supporting or working directly with infrastructure, cloud, or IT operations teams.
• Working fluency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) - enough to hold a credible technical conversation, scope work realistically, and challenge estimates.
• Hands-on experience in Agile/Scrum environments, including partnering with product owners and scrum masters on backlog and sprint planning.
• Proven track record of leading process improvement initiatives with measurable, documented outcomes.
• Experience with ITSM practices and tooling (ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or equivalent) across incident, problem, and change management.
• Strong executive communication skills - able to move between technical depth and leadership summary without losing either audience.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and align stakeholders without direct authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud certification (AWS Solutions Architect / SysOps, Azure Administrator, or equivalent).
• Background in a regulated environment (financial services, healthcare, government) with associated audit and compliance exposure.
• Experience driving automation or tooling integration programs that reduced manual operational workload.
• Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization programs.

Core Competencies