Location: Amersfoort CDI, Netherlands
Position Summary
Thales delivers cloud-based authentication and identity services to high-profile customers who depend on uncompromising security and availability. We are expanding our leadership team to scale and continuously improve IAM services for North American customers.
You will lead a team responsible for cloud infrastructure, automation, and service reliability. You will advance DevOps, SRE, and AIOps practices to deliver secure, scalable services across AWS/GCP, partnering closely with Engineering, Security, Service Desk, and customer-facing teams.
Key Responsibilities & Leadership Impact
Leadership & Team Management
- Lead, coach, and grow a team of Cloud/DevOps engineers; drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
- Set and track OKRs, manage priorities, and align execution with IAM Services objectives.
- Build a culture of ownership and operational excellence, partnering with global engineering leaders on standards and the long-term cloud roadmap.
Cloud Infrastructure Ownership
- Own end-to-end operations of the IAM cloud platform across AWS and GCP, ensuring resilience, scalability, performance, and security.
- Drive modernization with cloud-native architectures, container orchestration, platform engineering, and zero-trust principles.
- Lead roadmap planning, capacity management, and cost/efficiency optimization to meet growth and SLA commitments.
DevOps, Automation & Platform Engineering
- Lead the design and governance of CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and automation frameworks that enable safe, repeatable change.
- Own implementation and lifecycle of tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, and GitLab CI/CD.
- Enforce secure engineering standards and reusable patterns through reviews, automation, and continuous improvement.
- Establish best practices for observability, incident response, and SRE (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, post-incident reviews).
AI, AIOps & Intelligent Operations
- Lead adoption of AIOps to improve MTTR and reliability through anomaly detection, noise reduction, predictive capacity planning, and automated remediation.
- Partner with architects to support AI workloads and enable LLM-assisted operations (runbooks, incident summaries, knowledge search) with secure data access and scalable infrastructure.
- Champion responsible AI with clear governance, auditability, and secure-by-design practices aligned to Thales and customer requirements.
Operational Excellence
- Ensure 24/7 availability of critical IAM services through strong L2/L3 support, operational readiness, and measurable outcomes.
- Own on-call and escalation frameworks; continuously improve reliability, change management, and release safety.
- Lead incident management end-to-end: coordination, stakeholder communication, root cause analysis, and systemic corrective actions.
Cross-Functional & Customer Engagement
- Collaborate with R&D, Security, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Service Desk to deliver reliable outcomes for customers and complex deployments.
- Join customer engagements as needed (architecture reviews, escalations) to represent Operations leadership and reinforce customer trust.
- Represent Cloud Operations in strategic planning, audits, risk management, and executive communications.
Minimum Qualifications
- People leadership experience managing and developing technical teams (coaching, feedback, delivery accountability).
- 5+ years deploying and supporting large-scale cloud applications in production.
- 5+ years with infrastructure automation and DevOps tooling including Terraform, Helm/Ansible, GitLab pipelines, and Python.
- Deep expertise with Kubernetes (e.g., K8s, OpenShift) in production.
- Strong understanding of change management, SLA/uptime commitments, operational playbooks, and escalation workflows.
- Experience operating production systems at scale in AWS and/or GCP.
- Strong knowledge of distributed systems (REST APIs, microservices) and data stores (relational/NoSQL).
- Strong Linux/Windows fundamentals and solid understanding of cloud security best practices.
- Excellent communication and ability to lead in a geographically distributed environment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- Experience with AIOps, observability, and SRE and/or platform engineering practices.
Interested?
Apply now. We look forward to receiving your application.
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