Vice President, Cloud Engineering & Operations

At UKG, the work you do matters. The code you ship, the decisions you make, and the care you show a customer all add up to real impact. Today, tens of millions of workers start and end their days with our workforce operating platform. Helping people get paid, grow in their careers, and shape the future of their industries. That's what we do.

We never stop learning. We never stop challenging the norm. We push for better, and we celebrate the wins along the way. Here, you'll get flexibility that's real, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together. Because at UKG, your work matters-and so do you.

UKG is seeking a visionary and results-driven Vice President of Cloud Engineering & Operations to lead the strategy, design, and execution of our global cloud infrastructure and operations. This executive will play a critical role in enabling UKG's next phase of growth by ensuring our cloud platforms are scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-efficient.

In addition, this leader will help shape and enable UKG's AI-driven innovation strategy, ensuring our cloud platforms are optimized to support machine learning, generative AI, and data-intensive workloads at scale.

You will lead a high-performing organization of engineers and operations professionals, drive innovation while maintaining operational excellence across mission-critical systems that support millions of users worldwide.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute a comprehensive cloud engineering and operations strategy aligned with UKG's business goals and technology objectives, including support for AI/ML and data platforms. • Lead the design, implementation, and optimization of scalable, highly available cloud infrastructure supporting enterprise-grade applications, data platforms, and AI/ML workloads.
• Establish and continuously improve best practices for cloud operations, including monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, and service reliability.
• Partner with data science, AI/ML, and product teams to enable robust, secure, and scalable environments for model development, training, deployment, and inference.
• Drive initiatives to improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency of cloud services, including optimization of compute-intensive AI/ML workloads.
• Champion automation and intelligent operations (AIOps), leveraging AI/ML to enhance observability, incident detection, and remediation.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, security, and business stakeholders to prioritize initiatives and ensure alignment with company goals.
• Build, lead, and mentor a diverse, high-performing team of cloud engineers, SREs, and operations professionals.
• Partner with security, privacy, and compliance teams to ensure cloud and AI environments meet regulatory requirements and responsible AI standards.
• Manage relationships with cloud providers and third-party vendors, including those supporting AI/ML platforms and services, ensuring service excellence and SLA compliance.
• Oversee disaster recovery and business continuity strategies to ensure minimal disruption to services.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in cloud computing, AI/ML, and generative AI, identifying opportunities to enhance UKG's competitive advantage.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; Master's degree preferred
• 10+ years of experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure, or operations, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform
• Experience supporting or enabling AI/ML platforms, data pipelines, or largescale data processing environments
• Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), automation, and configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, etc.)
• Proven track record of designing and operating highly available, scalable, and resilient cloud environments
• Familiarity with MLOps, AIOps, or AI infrastructure (e.g., GPU workloads, model deployment frameworks, or data platforms) preferred
• Demonstrated success leading large, distributed teams in a fast-paced, agile environment
• Strong business acumen with the ability to balance innovation, risk, cost, and responsible AI practices
• Excellent communication and executive presence, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Data-driven mindset with strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities