This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of Totara’s cloud platform
Historically, our software has been released annually and deployed in a variety of ways by both Totara and our partners. Today, we’re evolving towards operating our platform as a modern SaaS service: continuously delivered, consistently operated, and available wherever our customers need us around the world
We’re clear on where we’re heading, but how we get there is still being built. As Head of Cloud Platform Engineering, you’ll play a central role in defining that journey
Today our infrastructure capability spans multiple teams, regions, and platforms, including environments inherited through acquisition. These teams have built valuable expertise, and your role will be to bring them together behind a shared operating model, common engineering standards, and a platform that enables our product teams to move faster with confidence
You’ll lead the teams responsible for how we provision, deploy, operate, observe, secure, and optimise the infrastructure that supports our global customer base
Unlike many SaaS businesses, our customers run on dedicated deployments rather than shared multi-tenant infrastructure. Operating thousands of isolated environments efficiently, securely, and economically is one of the most interesting challenges this role will tackle
Today we’re primarily AWS-based, with multi-cloud capability becoming an important next step. Our customers include governments and highly regulated organisations with specific regional, sovereignty, and compliance requirements, so expanding our cloud footprint is driven by genuine customer need rather than technology for technology’s sake
Build a unified operating model across our infrastructure and cloud engineering teams
Establish shared engineering standards, on-call practices, and ways of working
Champion engineering excellence across infrastructure as code, peer review, operational readiness, and change management
Build, coach, and develop a high-performing distributed team
Building a scalable platform
Own the platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to provision, deploy, and operate services without reinventing infrastructure
Define and improve our service reliability through clear SLOs, recovery objectives, and operational practices
Make observability a core part of every platform capability, with logging, metrics, tracing, and operational runbooks built in from the start
Continuously reduce operational toil through automation, self-service, and self-healing systems so that growth doesn’t require proportional operational effort
Modernising our infrastructure
Lead the infrastructure migration towards our target operating model through incremental, low-risk delivery
Develop repeatable, automated lifecycle management for our dedicated customer deployments, with clear isolation and resilience built in
Cloud architecture and cost
Own the architecture, security, resilience, and operational effectiveness of our AWS estate
Embed FinOps into everyday engineering decisions, helping us understand and improve the economics of operating our SaaS platform at scale
Security and compliance
Work closely with security and engineering leaders to ensure our platform is secure, compliant, and resilient by default
Support the evidence, auditability, and regional data residency requirements expected by enterprise, government, and regulated customers
Multi-cloud strategy
Lead our expansion into additional cloud providers where customer requirements make this necessary
Build portability where it adds genuine value, while keeping the platform pragmatic and avoiding unnecessary complexity
What success looks like:
Within your first six months
Infrastructure teams are working within a shared operating model, with common standards and on-call practices
A clear, costed, phased migration plan is agreed and early delivery is underway
Executive reporting includes meaningful visibility of service reliability and cloud unit economics
Within your first year
Automated provisioning and lifecycle management for our target platform is operating successfully in production
Operational effort grows significantly more slowly than our customer base
The platform engineering organisation is working as one team with a strong engineering culture and consistently high standards- Deep hands-on AWS expertise across infrastructure as code (such as Terraform), containers, orchestration, networking, and cloud security
Leading platform or infrastructure engineering within a growing B2B SaaS business
We’re looking for someone who combines deep technical expertise with thoughtful leadership and a passion for building great engineering organisations. You’ll likely bring experience including:
A strong Site Reliability Engineering mindset, including service levels, incident management, observability, and operational excellence
Experience working within regulated industries where security, compliance, and governance are fundamental design considerations
Practical FinOps experience, with a track record of improving cloud cost efficiency
Leading and growing distributed engineering teams across multiple locations, including bringing together teams following organisational change or acquisition
Real-world experience delivering multi-cloud platforms, with good judgement about when portability genuinely adds value
Experience designing and operating dedicated customer or cell-based deployment models, with a strong understanding of isolation, resilience, and operational economics
Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, IRAP, or similar
Experience building platforms or ecosystems that enable partners or third parties to extend products
Experience transitioning products from hosted or self-managed deployments to fully managed SaaS
