Remote Director Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Jobs in Chicago, IL

The Director of Cloud Engineering is a senior engineering leader accountable for the strategy, architecture, and operational excellence of the company's multi-cloud platform. Reporting to the Sr. Director of IT Operations, this role owns the end-to-end cloud estate across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure, setting the technical direction for cloud-native infrastructure, platform engineering, and developer experience.

You will build and lead a high-performing distributed team of cloud engineers, SREs, and platform engineers while partnering closely with product, security, data, and application engineering to deliver a reliable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud foundation. This is a hands-on leadership role that balances deep technical credibility with the strategic thinking and organizational influence expected at the Director level.

Key Responsibilities:

Cloud Platform Strategy & Architecture

Define and own the multi-cloud architecture strategy across GCP and Azure, aligning platform capabilities with business objectives, scalability requirements, and total cost of ownership targets.

Lead architectural decisions for cloud-native workloads, including microservices, containerization (Kubernetes/GKE/AKS), serverless functions, and event-driven patterns.

Drive the evolution of the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), enabling self-service infrastructure provisioning, golden-path templates, and standardized deployment pipelines.

Establish and enforce cloud governance frameworks, including resource hierarchy, landing zones, policy-as-code, and guardrails across both cloud providers.

Evaluate emerging technologies-AI/ML infrastructure, LLMOps tooling, edge compute-and make build-vs-buy recommendations grounded in cost, risk, and strategic fit.

Infrastructure Engineering & Operations

Own Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards and practices; ensure all infrastructure changes flow through version-controlled, peer-reviewed pipelines.

Oversee GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipeline infrastructure, partnering with application teams to reduce deployment lead time and increase release frequency.

Direct SRE practices across the cloud estate: define and track SLIs/SLOs, drive blameless post-mortems, and lead reliability improvements through systematic error-budget management.

Own observability strategy-logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting-across cloud environments, ensuring engineers have actionable insight into system health and performance.

Lead disaster recovery design, runbook development, and regular DR/BCP testing exercises; drive remediation of identified gaps to closure.

Administer and maintain all Microsoft licensing through NCE and MPSA agreements

Maintain network architecture and connectivity across cloud environments, data centers, and supported locations, including VPN, private connectivity (Interconnect/ExpressRoute), and DNS.

Security, Compliance & Risk

Partner with the Security team to implement Zero Trust network architecture, enforce least-privilege IAM, and operationalize Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tooling.

Ensure cloud environments meet regulatory and compliance requirements; support internal and external audits by providing architecture documentation, access logs, and control evidence.

Define and maintain cloud security baselines, secrets management practices, and data encryption standards across the shared responsibility model.

Drive incident response processes for cloud infrastructure events, ensuring timely escalation, containment, and root-cause resolution.

FinOps & Cloud Cost Management

Own the cloud infrastructure budget; implement FinOps practices including cost allocation tagging, chargeback/showback reporting, reserved capacity planning, and rightsizing recommendations.

Establish cloud cost visibility and governance mechanisms so engineering teams can make cost-aware architecture decisions in real time.

Negotiate vendor agreements and manage strategic relationships with GCP, Azure, and key third-party tooling providers.

AI-Enabled Cloud Engineering

Evaluate, integrate, and champion the responsible use of AI tools across cloud engineering and platform teams, setting standards for AI-driven productivity and innovation.

Treat AI as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement - ensuring engineers maintain sound engineering judgment and that AI-generated code and configuration meet the same quality, security, and reliability standards as hand-written work.

Leadership & People Management

Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of cloud engineers, platform engineers, and SREs (onshore and offshore); establish clear career ladders and development paths.

Build a team culture grounded in psychological safety, continuous learning, and engineering excellence; champion internal tech talks, documentation habits, and knowledge sharing.

Manage headcount planning, recruiting, and onboarding; partner with HR and technical leads to define roles and evaluate candidates.

Deliver timely, constructive performance reviews; proactively manage performance issues and recognize high-impact contributions.

Serve as a technical escalation path and executive sponsor for major infrastructure initiatives; represent the cloud engineering team in IT governance and steering forums.

Experience

15+ years in IT/infrastructure engineering, with at least 8 years focused on public cloud platforms (GCP and/or Azure).

5+ years in a senior engineering leadership role (Director, Principal, or Staff Engineer equivalent) managing teams of 8 or more engineers across onshore and offshore locations.

Demonstrated hands-on proficiency with both GCP and Azure services, including but not limited to: GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Armor, BigQuery, VPC Service Controls (GCP) and AKS, Azure Policy, Defender for Cloud, ExpressRoute, and Entra ID (Azure).

Proven track record delivering large-scale cloud migrations, re-architecture projects, or greenfield platform builds in a regulated or enterprise environment.

Deep expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform required; Pulumi or CDK a plus) and GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent).

Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines at enterprise scale (GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, Azure DevOps, or equivalent).

Direct experience with FinOps practices: cloud cost allocation, tagging governance, reserved instance/committed-use optimization, and budget reporting.

Familiarity with SRE principles: SLI/SLO frameworks, error budgets, chaos engineering, and reliability-focused incident management.

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a closely related engineering discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

Certifications

At least one of: Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Google Cloud Professional DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305), or Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400).

Preferred Qualifications

Experience building or maturing an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) using tools such as Backstage, Crossplane, or similar platform-engineering frameworks.

Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure on GCP (Vertex AI) or Azure (Azure AI Studio, Azure Machine Learning) and an understanding of LLMOps patterns such as model serving, inference optimization, and vector database infrastructure.

Working knowledge of service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) and zero-trust network segmentation at the workload level.

Experience with cloud-native observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Dynatrace, or Google Cloud Operations Suite).

Familiarity with enterprise IT governance frameworks such as ITIL v4, COBIT 2019, or TOGAF; direct experience supporting SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA/PCI-DSS compliance programs.

Experience in financial services, healthcare, or another regulated industry where cloud security posture and audit readiness are operationally critical.

Additional certifications: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Terraform Associate, Google Cloud Professional Security Engineer, or AWS Solutions Architect (for multi-cloud context).