Director, Cloud Infrastructure at Accommodations Plus International

About this role

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, and activities may change at any time according to business needs.
The performance of additional 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
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Originally posted on Himalayas