Executive Optimization Engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Executive Director - Platform Engineering, SRE, Governance

Salary: Open + Bonus

Location: Chicago, IL

Hybrid: Chicago, IL

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree
• 15+ years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, platform reliability, and infrastructure roles with at least 5 years in senior engineering leadership.
• Proven executive-level leadership of SRE, cloud engineering, and platform reliability in a regulated industry environment.
• Demonstrated ability to build and scale SRE practices including SLO/SLA frameworks, on-call models, error budgets, and incident response programs.
• Deep expertise in cloud architecture strategy and governance, with experience defining and driving enterprise-wide architectural standards.
• Demonstrated experience serving in a Product Manager capacity for technical domains such as FinOps, SecOps, or platform tooling, including ownership of roadmap, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment.
• Experience establishing and managing governance and compliance frameworks within a platform or infrastructure engineering organization, including oversight of incidents, problem management, risk items, and audit obligations.
• Deep knowledge of SRE tooling and observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, Datadog, or equivalents).
• Expert-level knowledge of cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform; experience with multi-cloud or hybrid environments preferred.
• Strong working knowledge of cloud-native architecture patterns and Infrastructure as Code principles.
• Familiarity with container orchestration and streaming platforms (Kubernetes, Kafka) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalents).
• Experience with metrics and reporting platforms; ability to design KPI frameworks and reporting dashboards for both technical and executive audiences.
• Working knowledge of FinOps principles and cloud cost governance, with experience driving cost transparency and optimization at an organizational level.
• Familiarity with SecOps tooling and security governance practices within a cloud or platform engineering context.
• Experience with GRC tooling or platforms used to manage risk, audit findings, and compliance obligations (e.g., ServiceNow, Archer, or equivalents).

Responsibilities

• Lead the scaling and maturation of the SRE practice, establishing error budgets, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response frameworks across all platform services.
• Partner with Platform Foundation teams (Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps/Security) to embed reliability principles into build and operate models.
• Serve as Product Manager for the FinOps and SecOps domains within Platform Engineering, owning the product vision, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment for governance tooling and practices.
• Establish and maintain a governance framework ensuring Platform Engineering adheres to organizational standards across incident and problem management, SORTs, risk tracking, and audit findings.
• Own the end-to-end process for PE compliance obligations, ensuring timely resolution and closure of incidents, problem tickets, risk items, and audit observations with clear accountability and tracking.
• Lead the scaling and maturation of the SRE practice, establishing error budgets, SLOs, SLAs, and incident response frameworks across all platform services.
• Partner with Platform Engineering Product teams (Kubernetes, Kafka, FinOps/Security) to embed reliability principles into build and operate models.
• Champion toil reduction through automation, ensuring engineering capacity is redirected from manual operations to higher-value platform capabilities.
• Define and execute the multi-year cloud architecture strategy aligned to business growth, scalability, regulatory compliance, and cost optimization goals.
• Establish cloud architectural standards, reference architectures, and governance frameworks (landing zones, identity, network patterns, service catalog) and drive adoption across engineering.
• Guide cloud-native architecture decisions including containers/orchestration, IaaS/PaaS adoption, disaster recovery, and multi-region patterns with a steady eye on regulatory requirements (e.g., CIS, NIST).
• Serve as a key technical advisor to senior leadership, translating complex architectural trade-offs into clear business decisions.
• Own the platform metrics and reporting function, establishing a consistent framework for measuring platform health, engineering velocity, reliability, and cost efficiency across CARE.
• Define and track KPIs aligned to internal SLAs, executive reporting needs, and audit/compliance requirements.
• Serve as the primary engineering leadership partner to the Platform Engineering Program Management function, ensuring platform initiatives are properly scoped, sequenced, and resourced.
• Drive alignment between engineering capacity and roadmap commitments, proactively surfacing dependency risks and trade-off decisions to the CARE Executive Director.
• Lead, develop, and retain a high-performing team of engineering managers and individual contributors with clear ownership, career paths, and accountability frameworks.
• Manage budget for areas of responsibility; ensure adherence to schedules, work plans, and performance requirements.