Director, Cloud and Technical Operations

Posted December 12, 2021
Apply: Topcon


Topcon Positioning Group is headquartered in Livermore, California, USA (topconpositioning.com). Topcon Positioning Group designs, manufactures and distributes precise positioning products and solutions for the global surveying, construction, agriculture, civil engineering, BIM, mapping and GIS, asset management and mobile control markets.

To learn more about Topcon career opportunities go to www.topconcareers.com.

Summary

The Director, Cloud/Technical Operations role leads the operation, governance and compliance activities of Topcon's enterprise cloud-based SaaS services, applications and interfaces which are customer facing, throughout Topcon Positioning Systems' lines of business. The Director is responsible for monitoring and driving excellence in daily operations, system and application availability, data integrity, cloud cost efficiency, communications, and compliance to privacy regulations and standards.

This role will work in close partnership with distributed product engineering/DevOps resources in all phases of the software/service release lifecycle and will also partner with Topcon IT's Information Security, Business Application and Infrastructure teams to ensure that the availability, fidelity and security of all system components and software related to customer facing applications meet company requirements.

Responsibilities
  • Works in alignment and collaboration with the global Information Security team, ensuring that operations functions and activities accommodate security related initiatives such as application security, system patching, creation of secure standard OS/Platform images, and handling operational incidents, with the shared goal of maintaining and improving the security posture of Topcon's environment.
  • Develops and manages financial budgets for services/expenditures as necessary to support operations and delivery of all in scope services.
  • Hands on knowledge of typical CI/CD tools and workflows including automation and orchestration functions (e.g. Jenkins, Ansible, Kubernetes, etc.)
  • Deep analytical and technical troubleshooting skills, and the ability to effectively lead incident response and disaster recovery efforts resulting in rapid engagement of resources and resolution of issues.
  • Exceptional People Management skills, focused on team alignment, cohesion and leverage, workload prioritization, employee skill and career development, mentoring, performance and compensation management, conflict resolution, and goal setting; Must be able to strategically plan and build a hybrid team and determine insource/outsource needs.
  • Ability to influence colleagues (technical and non-technical) and executives in pursuit of desirable operational outcomes.
  • Strong communication and collaboration skills necessary to effectively engage with technical, non-technical, and executive personnel as well as colleagues within Engineering, Product Management, and IT.
  • Advanced knowledge and practical experience deploying and using application and infrastructure performance monitoring and dashboard tools; Demonstrated knowledge of relevant operational metrics and KPIs for SaaS applications and infrastructure.
  • Must be able to multitask and work on multiple projects and initiatives concurrently.
  • Must display high energy and a possess a proactive, creative approach to and focus on continuous improvement.
  • Detail and process oriented and can drive adoption of best practices standards in service operations.
  • Ensures all in scope services (customer facing SaaS, dependent internal/shared IT systems/services) meet planned operational service levels/SLAs (up to 24/7/365) and are cost and resource efficient; Partners with Engineering/DevOps resources, Customer Support, IT, and other functions to execute code/service releases; Coordinates Incident Response activities during impacting operational events, and plans for, coordinates and leads testing of Disaster Recovery capabilities; Establishes and reports on service delivery metrics and KPIs and creates a continuous improvement program and culture; Establishes and follows related ITSM/operations processes. Assists in developing analytics capabilities for in scope platforms.
  • Establishes a hybrid (matrixed) team of geographically disbursed technical and project staff of varying experience levels, with both direct reports and "leveraged" resources expected; provides technical and operations/service delivery leadership as well as career and skill development of staff; Sets operational objectives, priorities, and work plans.


Qualifications
  • B.S. degree or equivalent, with a technical emphasis
  • 10+ years of direct hands-on technical experience creating and operationally managing typical IT and public cloud SaaS services, using ITSM/best practice processes. Must have recent experience managing operations end to end for highly available revenue generating cloud-based SaaS applications, services and infrastructure in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • 7+ years of experience directly managing or supervising experienced technical and support staff and external service providers in the delivery of cloud and legacy IT services. Experience managing subordinate managers is a strong plus as is managing globally distributed teams/resources.
  • Extensive IT and cloud system troubleshooting with critical incident command experience.
  • Must have experience supporting and managing distributed/scalable databases and data protection/integrity.
  • Travel estimated to be 10% of time, typically international (requires valid passport).


Topcon is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran, or disability status.