Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Totara is a global learning platform serving organisations with workforce learning, compliance, and talent development solutions. The Head of Cloud Platform Engineering will unify infrastructure teams, lead the evolution to a scalable SaaS platform, and oversee cloud architecture, reliability, security, compliance, automation, cost management, and multi-cloud strategy.
Responsibilities
- Build a unified operating model across our infrastructure and cloud engineering teams
- Establish shared engineering standards, on-call practices, and ways of working
- Champion engineering excellence across infrastructure as code, peer review, operational readiness, and change management
- Build, coach, and develop a high-performing distributed team
- Own the platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to provision, deploy, and operate services without reinventing infrastructure
- Define and improve our service reliability through clear SLOs, recovery objectives, and operational practices
- Make observability a core part of every platform capability, with logging, metrics, tracing, and operational runbooks built in from the start
- Continuously reduce operational toil through automation, self-service, and self-healing systems so that growth doesn't require proportional operational effort
- Lead the infrastructure migration towards our target operating model through incremental, low-risk delivery
- Develop repeatable, automated lifecycle management for our dedicated customer deployments, with clear isolation and resilience built in
- Own the architecture, security, resilience, and operational effectiveness of our AWS estate
- Embed FinOps into everyday engineering decisions, helping us understand and improve the economics of operating our SaaS platform at scale
- Work closely with security and engineering leaders to ensure our platform is secure, compliant, and resilient by default
- Support the evidence, auditability, and regional data residency requirements expected by enterprise, government, and regulated customers
- Lead our expansion into additional cloud providers where customer requirements make this necessary
- Build portability where it adds genuine value, while keeping the platform pragmatic and avoiding unnecessary complexity
Skills
- Leading platform or infrastructure engineering within a growing B2B SaaS business
- Deep hands-on AWS expertise across infrastructure as code (such as Terraform), containers, orchestration, networking, and cloud security
- Experience designing and operating dedicated customer or cell-based deployment models, with a strong understanding of isolation, resilience, and operational economics
- A strong Site Reliability Engineering mindset, including service levels, incident management, observability, and operational excellence
- Practical FinOps experience, with a track record of improving cloud cost efficiency
- Leading and growing distributed engineering teams across multiple locations, including bringing together teams following organisational change or acquisition
- Experience working within regulated industries where security, compliance, and governance are fundamental design considerations
- Real-world experience delivering multi-cloud platforms, with good judgement about when portability genuinely adds value
- Experience transitioning products from hosted or self-managed deployments to fully managed SaaS
- Experience building platforms or ecosystems that enable partners or third parties to extend products
- Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, IRAP, or similar
Benefits
- Lead a strategic function with strong executive support.
- Shape the future of security, trust and resilience for a global SaaS platform.
- Work with talented colleagues across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US.
- Flexible and hybrid ways of working.
- Unlimited PTO
- Enhanced Parental Leave
- Professional Development Opportunities
- Annual Wellbeing Allowance
- New Joiner home working set-up allowance
- Additional Paid Leave: Birthday off, Working days between Christmas and New Years Eve
Company Overview