Director, Technical Products and Operations

About the role

Real Chemistry is seeking a hands‑on Director, Technical Product Operations to own the end‑to‑end management, operation, and security of its flagship client‑facing SaaS platforms hosted on AWS. This working‑leadership position requires direct involvement in architecture, deployment, security, and production support while guiding a team.

Key responsibilities

• Own the full lifecycle of SaaS products on AWS, from design and deployment to ongoing operation, optimization, and support.
• Architect and maintain scalable, resilient AWS environments with clear separation across development, staging, and production.
• Lead high‑availability and disaster‑recovery design, ensuring contractual uptime commitments.
• Manage infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and promotion paths between environments.
• Maintain platform security posture, drive SOC 2 compliance, and coordinate penetration testing and vulnerability remediation.
• Support secure integration of AI/ML and LLM features, establishing data handling and cost guardrails.
• Establish SLAs, incident response playbooks, on‑call coverage, and runbooks to ensure reliable client experience.
• Lead and mentor the external IT/platform engineering team and collaborate with security, product, and client‑facing groups.

Required profile

• Hands‑on experience implementing and operating a product on AWS infrastructure.
• 7+ years in IT/platform engineering or cloud operations, with at least 3 years running production workloads in AWS.
• Proven leadership of external IT, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering teams.
• Strong knowledge of SOC 2 controls and practical implementation.
• Experience delivering a commercial multi‑tenant SaaS product.
• Background in productionizing AI/LLM‑enabled features and governing AI usage.
• Familiarity with regulated environments such as HIPAA, GDPR, or GxP.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or equivalent practical experience.

Required skills

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) – compute, networking, databases, IAM.
• Infrastructure‑as‑Code with Terraform.
• CI/CD pipeline design and management.
• Security best practices – least‑privilege IAM, secrets management, logging/audit.
• High‑availability and disaster‑recovery (HA/DR) design.
• Observability tooling – metrics, logging, tracing, alerting.
• Containerization and orchestration (ECS/Fargate, EKS).
• AWS Lambda.
• AI/ML and LLM integration with data classification and cost controls.
• FinOps – cost optimization on cloud platforms.

What we offer

• Comprehensive benefits program including medical, dental, vision, and mental‑wellness coaching.
• Generous paid time off, holidays, and flexible work arrangements.
• Access to over 13,000 online courses via LinkedIn Learning.
• Free snacks at office locations and a collaborative hybrid‑remote culture.