Who We Are
Accommodations Plus International (API) is a technology and services company focused on driving innovation across the travel and transportation industry. We partner with organizations in the airline, cruise, and rail sectors to deliver solutions that improve layover operations, enhance customer experience, and support long-term growth. Our mission is to make layovers simpler and more efficient for crew members - and we bring that to life through deep industry expertise and a practical, results-driven approach. Today, API’s platform powers over 18 million crew room nights each year for 100+ airlines and travel operators worldwide. Our Global Reach ensures that airline crews are rested, transported, and connected so global aviation runs on time. At API, we’re building a culture rooted in succeeding and thriving together. It’s a place where people are encouraged to take ownership, develop their skills, and contribute to work that matters. If you’re looking to grow your career in a company that values steady progress, real impact, and long-term development, we’d like to meet you!
Summary/Objective
The Senior Director of Cloud Infrastructure & Technical Operations is the senior technical authority for the reliability, scalability, performance, and security of API's cloud-based platform and infrastructure. This is a hands-on, player-coach role: an expert AWS architect and network engineer who also leads people. Operating globally, the Senior Director will set and review AWS architecture, including multi-account design, hybrid and multi-region networking, and security controls, while developing distributed cloud, network, SRE, and DevOps teams. The role owns AWS governance, system reliability, and service continuity, and serves as the primary bridge between technology operations and the business. The ideal candidate combines deep, current AWS and cloud networking expertise with strong people leadership, financial acumen, and executive partnership skills.
Essential Functions:
Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
Leadership & Team Management
- Lead, mentor, and develop globally distributed technical operations teams, building a collaborative, high-performance culture across time zones and cultures
- Define team structure, roles, and career paths for cloud engineers, network engineers, SREs, and DevOps practitioners across both locations
- Serve as the technical escalation point and mentor for cloud and network engineers; take part directly in architecture reviews, major incident response, and root-cause analysis
- Set goals, KPIs, and performance expectations for the organization; conduct regular reviews and provide ongoing coaching
- Partner with HR and talent acquisition to recruit and retain top technical talent across our global locations
- Collaborate with product engineering, security, data, and business teams to integrate operational requirements into the software development lifecycle
Cloud Infrastructure & AWS
- Serve as the senior technical authority for API's global AWS environment and own its governance and operations, including multi-account strategy (Organizations, Control Tower), security controls, compliance posture, and cost management
- Drive cloud cost optimization, including Reserved Instance and Savings Plans management, rightsizing, tagging governance, and FinOps practices
- Establish and enforce AWS security best practices including IAM least-privilege access, SCPs, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, and CloudTrail audit logging across all environments
- Oversee multi-region and multi-AZ strategies that meet disaster recovery objectives, minimize RTO/RPO, and maintain continuous availability for global customers
- Evaluate new AWS services and infrastructure technologies and present adoption recommendations to senior leadership
- Define infrastructure as code standards (Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK), CI/CD-driven change, and Well-Architected reviews
Cloud Network Architecture & Engineering
- Architect and hold final technical accountability for AWS network design, including multi-account/multi-VPC topologies, CIDR planning, segmentation, Transit Gateway routing, PrivateLink, and centralized egress and inspection
- Own hybrid connectivity between AWS, API's global offices, and partners, including Direct Connect, Site-to-Site and Client VPN, and BGP routing and failover design
- Design and operate DNS, edge, and traffic management, including Route 53, CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and Elastic Load Balancing
- Define network security architecture, including security groups, NACLs, Network Firewall, WAF, Shield, zero-trust access, and segmentation of PCI-scoped workloads
- Establish network observability and resilience using VPC Flow Logs, Reachability Analyzer, and CloudWatch/Datadog; lead troubleshooting of complex cross-region and hybrid incidents and validate network failover during DR testing
System Reliability & Service Continuity
- Define and own SLAs and uptime commitments for all production systems; set reliability targets with product engineering and report performance to executive stakeholders
- Oversee monitoring and observability (CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana, or equivalent) for proactive detection and rapid response
- Drive capacity planning so infrastructure scales efficiently with growth without compromising performance or cost targets
- Own the IT disaster recovery and business continuity plan; lead tabletop exercises and failover testing to validate recovery
Strategy, Governance & Stakeholder Engagement
- Develop and execute the multi-year technical operations roadmap aligned with product strategy and growth objectives
- Provide regular reporting to the SVP of Infrastructure Engineering and Technical Operations and executive leadership, including infrastructure health, cost, and initiative progress
- Lead vendor relationships for cloud, infrastructure tooling, and managed services, including contract negotiations, SLA management, and performance reviews
- Ensure compliance with regulatory and data privacy requirements (SOC 2, GDPR, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001) as they apply to infrastructure; partner with security on audit readiness
- Manage the technical operations budget, including headcount, tooling, and cloud spend, with accurate forecasting and variance analysis Competencies
- Proven ability to build, scale, and retain high-performing technical teams across multiple geographies and time zones
- Executive presence; able to translate complex infrastructure concepts into clear narratives for C-suite and board audiences
- Strategic mindset balanced with operational discipline, from multi-year vision to day-to-day excellence
- Expert-level, current, hands-on command of AWS architecture, cloud networking, and security, sufficient to design and critique solutions and lead deep-dive troubleshooting in major incidents; not a people-management-only role
- Strong financial acumen managing multi-million-dollar cloud budgets and driving cost optimization without compromising reliability
- Skilled at leading globally distributed teams across multiple time zones
- Data-driven; uses metrics, SLOs, and KPIs to prioritize investments and communicate operational health
- Commitment to engineering excellence, blameless culture, and continuous learning
- Experience with AI based automation capabilities for system self-healing, stability and security.
Position Type and Expected Hours of Work This is a full-time position (exempt where applicable) based in the United States or Canada. This position can be remote or hybrid. Standard hours are Monday through Friday during core business hours. Given the global nature of this role, flexibility in scheduling is expected to accommodate regular collaboration with the Pune, India team across significant time zone differences. Occasional evening availability for major deployments and scheduled maintenance windows may be required.
Travel This position may require occasional travel within the United States and Canada, and possibly to India, to support vendor meetings, industry conferences, cross-functional leadership engagements, and business unit initiatives.
Required Education and Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field; Master's or MBA preferred; equivalent experience considered
- 15+ years in technology operations, infrastructure engineering, or cloud operations, including 8+ years of hands-on production AWS design and operations and 5+ years leading technical teams in a director, senior director, head-of, or equivalent senior leadership role, regardless of title
- Experience managing distributed teams across multiple countries; experience overseeing staff in India strongly preferred
- Expert knowledge of AWS services including compute (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda), storage (S3, EFS, EBS), databases (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache), and security (IAM, GuardDuty, Security Hub, WAF, Shield, Network Firewall)
- Deep expertise in cloud and enterprise networking, including TCP/IP, DNS, BGP, IPsec VPN, load balancing, and TLS, with experience designing hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect, VPN) and multi-VPC/multi-account architectures at scale (VPC, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Route 53, CloudFront)
- Hands-on proficiency with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK), CI/CD, and scripting (Python, Bash, or equivalent)
- Proven track record overseeing highly available, multi-region production systems with aggressive uptime and performance SLAs
- Experience managing cloud budgets, implementing FinOps, and presenting forecasts to executive leadership
- Experience with cloud security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, or PCI-DSS
- Experience owning observability platforms (Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana, or equivalent) and driving a metrics-driven approach to operational health
- Experience owning disaster recovery and business continuity programs for cloud infrastructure, including regular testing and executive reporting
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (or equivalent) required; Advanced Networking – Specialty and Security – Specialty strongly preferred
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience leading technical operations at a SaaS or cloud-native company supporting enterprise customers with high availability and data security requirements
- Database reliability engineering experience, including RDS/Aurora tuning, failover testing, and backup/recovery validation
- Experience with enterprise network architecture beyond AWS, including SD-WAN, MPLS, next-gen firewalls, and ZTNA
- Familiarity with change management; ServiceNow or Jira Service Management a plus
- Experience in travel technology, hospitality, or other high-volume, customer-facing SaaS
- Exposure to ML/AI infrastructure, including data pipeline reliability and model serving on AWS
Compensation
The good faith compensation for this position is
United States: $160,000 - $180,000 USD
Compensation is determined based on several factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and skill set, geographic location, as well as internal alignment and external benchmarks.
Other Duties Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time according to business needs. The performance of additional responsibilities if you are designated as a Data Protection Champion (DPC), Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) or Information Assurance Accounting Officer (IAAO). Work Environment This position operates in a professional office environment. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers, filing cabinets and fax machines. Physical Demands The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to talk or hear. The employee frequently is required to stand, walk; use hands to finger, handle or feel; and reach with hands and arms. AAP/EEO Statement Accommodations Plus International is an Equal Opportunity Employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, disability or handicap, sex, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, genetic information, arrest record, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws. Our management team is dedicated to this policy with respect to recruitment, hiring, placement, promotion, transfer, training, compensation, benefits, employee activities and general treatment during employment. Privacy Statement API may use the contact information you provide to communicate about this role, including via text message. See our [Privacy Policy] for details. By clicking "Apply" you agree to Rippling's Terms of Service / User Privacy Notice.
