Vice President, Cloud Engineering & Operations


Company: UKG Location: Boston, MA (On-site) Employment Type: Full-time Seniority Level: Executive

About UKG

At UKG, the work you do matters. Today, tens of millions of workers start and end their days with UKG's workforce operating platform — helping people get paid, grow in their careers, and shape the future of their industries. UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform that puts workforce understanding to work, combining the world's largest collection of workforce insights with people-first AI to build trust, amplify productivity, and empower talent.

Role Overview

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

This leader will also help shape UKG's AI-driven innovation strategy, ensuring cloud platforms are optimized to support machine learning, generative AI, and data-intensive workloads at scale — leading a high-performing organization of engineers and operations professionals across mission-critical systems serving millions of users worldwide.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute a comprehensive cloud engineering and operations strategy aligned with UKG's business goals, 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, 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, ensuring service excellence and SLA compliance
• Oversee disaster recovery and business continuity strategies to ensure minimal service disruption
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in cloud computing, AI/ML, and generative AI, identifying opportunities to enhance UKG's competitive advantage

Qualifications & Experience

• 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
• 5+ years in senior leadership roles
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform
• Experience supporting or enabling AI/ML platforms, data pipelines, or large-scale data processing environments
• Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), automation, and configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, etc.)
• Proven track record 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

Compensation & Benefits

Actual base pay may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge, and work location.

Equal Opportunity Employer

UKG is an equal opportunity employer, evaluating qualified applicants without regard to race, color, disability, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, or other legally protected categories. UKG participates in E-Verify.

For individuals with disabilities requiring additional assistance during the application or interview process, please email [email protected].