Join The Best Team In Sport & Spirit
At Varsity Brands, we believe every student deserves the opportunity to succeed and every educator wants to make a difference. It takes a team to make a real impact, and through our two divisions BSN SPORTS and Varsity Spirit and our network of 6,000+ employees and independent representatives, we are proud to partner with a wide range of educational institutions and club and professional sports to transform the student journey in SPORT and SPIRIT.
Location: Onsite 4 days per week at Varsity Brands HQ in Farmers Branch, TX
How You Will Make An Impact
Varsity Brands is seeking a transformational technology leader to lead the modernization of the company's cloud engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, network engineering, site reliability engineering (SRE), and enterprise infrastructure operations.
Reporting to the Chief Technology & Product Officer, the VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering will define and execute the enterprise infrastructure strategy while ensuring the reliability, security, scalability, and operational excellence of mission-critical technology platforms.
The VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering will lead Varsity Brands' multi-year transformation from traditional on-premises infrastructure to a modern AWS-based cloud platform while maintaining highly available enterprise systems throughout the transition. This role is accountable for building an automation-first engineering organization that enables product teams to deliver technology faster, improves customer experience, and supports the company's long-term digital growth.
Success in this role requires a professional who combines deep technical expertise with exceptional leadership, business partnership, and execution capabilities. The ideal candidate demonstrates a customer-first mindset, operates with urgency, proactively leads through ambiguity, builds trusted partnerships across Engineering, Product, Security, Data, AI, Enterprise Applications, and business functions, while ensuring infrastructure strategy aligns with business priorities and customer outcomes. This leader creates clarity where others see uncertainty, removes barriers to execution, and fosters a culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
Why This Role Matters
Varsity Brands is modernizing its technology platform to better serve customers, accelerate product delivery, strengthen enterprise reliability, and enable future growth. Cloud infrastructure has become a strategic business capability rather than simply an operational function.
The VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering will build the secure, scalable, and highly available technology foundation that enables Engineering, Product, Data, AI, Security, and business teams to innovate with confidence. This leader will also help establish the operating model, cross-functional partnerships, and execution discipline required to translate infrastructure modernization into faster delivery, stronger reliability, and better customer outcomes.
This role matters because it connects enterprise infrastructure strategy directly to business performance, customer experience, and the company's long-term transformation agenda.
What You Will Do:
Cloud Transformation Leadership
- Define and execute the multi-year cloud migration roadmap
- Lead migration of application workloads from on-premises infrastructure to AWS
- Design enterprise landing zones, networking, IAM, security, governance, and shared platform services
- Establish cloud architecture standards and engineering best practices
- Drive modernization through containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and platform engineering
- Lead the organizational change required to successfully execute the cloud transformation by aligning stakeholders, proactively removing barriers, driving adoption of modern engineering practices, making timely decisions, and maintaining momentum across the enterprise
Data Center Operations
- SAP ECC
- Nutanix or VMware
- Windows/Linux infrastructure
- Enterprise storage
- Backup & recovery
- Disaster Recovery
- Networking
- Firewalls
- Active Directory
- Monitoring
- Data center capacity planning
Maintain 24x7 operational excellence throughout the migration journey.
AWS Platform Engineering
- Landing Zones
- Organizations
- VPC Architecture
- IAM
- EKS
- ECS
- EC2
- RDS
- Aurora
- S3
- Lambda
- CloudFront
- Route53
- Bedrock
- CloudWatch
- Systems Manager
- Security Hub
- GuardDuty
- AWS Backup
Infrastructure Automation
- Terraform
- CloudFormation
- GitHub Actions
- CI/CD
- Automated environment provisioning
- Automated patching
- Policy as Code
- Configuration Management
- Self-service platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to provision infrastructure consistently, securely, and with minimal manual intervention
Reliability Engineering
- Observability
- Incident Management
- Availability Engineering
- Capacity Planning
- Performance Engineering
- Error Budgets
- Disaster Recovery
- Business Continuity
- Partner with Engineering, Product, Security, and IT Operations leaders to embed reliability, operational readiness, and customer impact into the software delivery lifecycle
Security & Compliance
- Zero Trust Architecture
- IAM governance
- Encryption
- Vulnerability Management
- Cloud Security
- Network Security
- PCI/SOX compliance
- Disaster Recovery testing
Financial Management
- Cloud cost optimization (FinOps)
- Data center cost optimization
- Vendor management
- Capacity forecasting
- Budget planning
- AWS Reserved Instances
- Savings Plans
- License optimization
- Balance cost optimization with platform reliability, scalability, security, and long-term business value
Organizational Leadership
- Cloud Engineering
- Infrastructure Engineering
- Network Engineering
- Platform Engineering
- DevOps
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Data Center Operations
- Build a culture focused on automation, reliability, operational excellence, and customer-first execution, where leaders demonstrate ownership, move with urgency, build trusted partnerships across teams, proactively resolve ambiguity, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and consistently deliver measurable business outcomes.
Enterprise Operational Leadership
- Define enterprise standards that guide infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, automation, and operational excellence across the technology organization
- Establish governance that aligns technology investments with business priorities
- Create executive visibility through infrastructure performance metrics, operational reporting, and business-focused dashboards
- Build strong partnerships across Engineering, Product, Security, Data, AI, Enterprise Applications, and business functions
- Remove organizational barriers that slow delivery and improve cross-functional collaboration
- Lead through ambiguity by proactively identifying decisions, resolving dependencies, and driving execution
- Foster a culture of urgency, ownership, customer focus, and continuous improvement
- Build operating rhythms that create transparency, accelerate decision-making, improve cross-functional alignment, and ensure timely execution of strategic priorities
- Ensure infrastructure and platform engineering decisions consistently balance customer impact, operational excellence, engineering productivity, security, and business value
- Partner proactively with business and technology leaders to anticipate organizational needs, align priorities, remove delivery barriers, and enable successful execution of enterprise initiatives
Leadership Responsibilities
- Establish a culture focused on automation, engineering excellence, operational discipline, and customer-first execution
- Develop and coach senior technology leaders while building organizational depth, succession capability, and a strong leadership bench
- Champion platform engineering principles that improve engineering productivity through automation, standardization, and self-service capabilities
- Build trusted partnerships with Engineering, Product, Security, Data, AI, Enterprise Applications, and business leaders to accelerate delivery of strategic business priorities
- Establish measurable operating rhythms, performance expectations, and accountability mechanisms that provide transparency into organizational performance and execution