Vice President, Cloud Engineering & Operations

About

Define and execute a comprehensive cloud engineering and operations strategy aligned with UKG's business goals and technology objectives, including support for AI/ML and data platforms.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, and optimization of scalable, highly available cloud infrastructure supporting enterprise-grade applications, data platforms, and AI/ML workloads.
• Establish and continuously improve best practices for cloud operations, including monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, and service reliability.
• Partner with data science, AI/ML, and product teams to enable robust, secure, and scalable environments for model development, training, deployment, and inference.
• Drive initiatives to improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency of cloud services, including optimization of compute-intensive AI/ML workloads.
• Champion automation and intelligent operations (AIOps), leveraging AI/ML to enhance observability, incident detection, and remediation.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders to prioritize initiatives and ensure alignment with company goals.
• Build, lead, and mentor a diverse, high-performing team of cloud engineers, SREs, and operations professionals.
• Partner with security, privacy, and compliance teams to ensure cloud and AI environments meet regulatory requirements and responsible AI standards.
• Manage relationships with cloud providers and third-party vendors, including those supporting AI/ML platforms and services, ensuring service excellence and SLA compliance.
• Oversee disaster recovery and business continuity strategies to ensure minimal disruption to services.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in cloud computing, AI/ML, and generative AI, identifying opportunities to enhance UKG's competitive advantage.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; Master's degree preferred
• 10+ years of experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure, or operations, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform
• Experience supporting or enabling AI/ML platforms, data pipelines, or largescale data processing environments
• Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), automation, and configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, etc.)
• Proven track record of designing and operating highly available, scalable, and resilient cloud environments
• Familiarity with MLOps, AIOps, or AI infrastructure (e.g., GPU workloads, model deployment frameworks, or data platforms) preferred
• Demonstrated success leading large, distributed teams in a fast-paced, agile environment
• Strong business acumen with the ability to balance innovation, risk, cost, and responsible AI practices
• Excellent communication and executive presence, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Data-driven mindset with strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities