We are seeking a strategic, hands-on VP of Cloud Operations to unify and lead our Cloud Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and DevOps disciplines under a single, cohesive organization. This is a newly consolidated leadership role for an infrastructure executive who cares deeply about building resilient, cost-efficient, cloud-native systems that keep PlayOn’s platforms fast, available, and ready to scale.
Reporting to the CTO, the VP of Cloud Operations will partner closely with Software Engineering, Security, Product, and Data leadership to modernize how PlayOn builds, deploys, and operates its cloud footprint. You’ll play a critical role in supporting a multi-product platform (NFHS Network, GoFan, MaxPreps, PlayOn HQ) that streams over 600K+ live events and processes 700K+ ticketing events annually, all running cloud-native on AWS.
The outcomes you’ll deliver
Unified Infrastructure Organization - Consolidate Cloud Engineering, SRE, and DevOps into one coherent discipline with clear charters, on-call ownership, and career paths, eliminating duplicated tooling and conflicting standards.
Platform Reliability at Scale - Own availability and performance for PlayOn’s live-streaming and ticketing platforms, especially during peak concurrent load (Friday night football, championship weekends), with clearly defined SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.
Cost-Efficient Cloud Architecture - Build and run a FinOps practice that gives engineering and finance leadership real visibility into AWS spend, with measurable cost-per-stream and cost-per-event efficiency gains.
Modern Platform Engineering - Deliver a self-service internal developer platform built on Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and Kubernetes, so product engineering teams can ship and scale without infrastructure as a bottleneck.
Operational Excellence - Mature incident management, on-call, and postmortem practices to reduce mean time to detect and resolve (MTTD/MTTR) and cut the frequency of customer-impacting incidents.
Security & Compliance Partnership - Partner with the security organization to harden PlayOn’s cloud posture and keep infrastructure controls aligned with SOC 2 Type II and PCI DSS requirements.
In This Role, You Can Expect To
Serve as a core member of the technology leadership team, translating business goals into a unified cloud infrastructure and reliability strategy
Stand up a single Cloud Infrastructure organization out of today’s separate Cloud Engineering, SRE, and DevOps functions, defining team structure, on-call rotations, and escalation paths
Own cloud architecture strategy across PlayOn’s AWS accounts and regions, ensuring the platform scales cleanly for NFHS Network, GoFan, MaxPreps, and PlayOn HQ
Define, instrument, and track SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for critical services, and own the incident command process for major incidents
Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and a self-service internal developer platform that gives product engineering teams golden paths for provisioning and deployment
Own CI/CD strategy and deployment standards in partnership with Software Engineering leadership, improving deployment frequency and change failure rate
Lead a FinOps program covering cost visibility, showback/chargeback, reserved capacity planning, and budget forecasting across the AWS footprint
Own the observability stack (New Relic, CloudWatch, and related tooling), driving a shift from reactive firefighting to proactive monitoring and alerting
Own capacity planning for major sporting event surges — playoffs, championships, and other high-traffic moments — ensuring zero-downtime scaling
Recruit, mentor, and lead a team of cloud engineering, SRE, and DevOps managers and senior engineers, building a strong culture of ownership and operational rigor
Define and monitor KPIs for infrastructure performance (e.g., uptime, deployment frequency, MTTR, cloud cost efficiency), reporting regularly to the CTO and executive team
Partner with…