Manager, Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps

Location: Amersfoort CDI, Netherlands Position Summary Thales delivers cloud-based authentication and identity services to high-profile customers who depend on uncompromising security and availability. We are expanding our leadership team to scale and continuously improve IAM services for North American customers. You will lead a team responsible for cloud infrastructure, automation, and service reliability. You will advance DevOps, SRE, and AIOps practices to deliver secure, scalable services across AWS/GCP, partnering closely with Engineering, Security, Service Desk, and customer-facing teams. Key Responsibilities & Leadership Impact Leadership & Team Management - Lead, coach, and grow a team of Cloud/DevOps engineers; drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development. - Set and track OKRs, manage priorities, and align execution with IAM Services objectives. - Build a culture of ownership and operational excellence, partnering with global engineering leaders on standards and the long-term cloud roadmap. Cloud Infrastructure Ownership - Own end-to-end operations of the IAM cloud platform across AWS and GCP, ensuring resilience, scalability, performance, and security. - Drive modernization with cloud-native architectures, container orchestration, platform engineering, and zero-trust principles. - Lead roadmap planning, capacity management, and cost/efficiency optimization to meet growth and SLA commitments. DevOps, Automation & Platform Engineering - Lead the design and governance of CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and automation frameworks that enable safe, repeatable change. - Own implementation and lifecycle of tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, and GitLab CI/CD. - Enforce secure engineering standards and reusable patterns through reviews, automation, and continuous improvement. - Establish best practices for observability, incident response, and SRE (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, post-incident reviews). AI, AIOps & Intelligent Operations - Lead adoption of AIOps to improve MTTR and reliability through anomaly detection, noise reduction, predictive capacity planning, and automated remediation. - Partner with architects to support AI workloads and enable LLM-assisted operations (runbooks, incident summaries, knowledge search) with secure data access and scalable infrastructure. - Champion responsible AI with clear governance, auditability, and secure-by-design practices aligned to Thales and customer requirements. Operational Excellence - Ensure 24/7 availability of critical IAM services through strong L2/L3 support, operational readiness, and measurable outcomes. - Own on-call and escalation frameworks; continuously improve reliability, change management, and release safety. - Lead incident management end-to-end: coordination, stakeholder communication, root cause analysis, and systemic corrective actions. Cross-Functional & Customer Engagement - Collaborate with R&D, Security, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Service Desk to deliver reliable outcomes for customers and complex deployments. - Join customer engagements as needed (architecture reviews, escalations) to represent Operations leadership and reinforce customer trust. - Represent Cloud Operations in strategic planning, audits, risk management, and executive communications. Minimum Qualifications - People leadership experience managing and developing technical teams (coaching, feedback, delivery accountability). - 5+ years deploying and supporting large-scale cloud applications in production. - 5+ years with infrastructure automation and DevOps tooling including Terraform, Helm/Ansible, GitLab pipelines, and Python. - Deep expertise with Kubernetes (e.g., K8s, OpenShift) in production. - Strong understanding of change management, SLA/uptime commitments, operational playbooks, and escalation workflows. - Experience operating production systems at scale in AWS and/or GCP. - Strong knowledge of distributed systems (REST APIs, microservices) and data stores (relational/NoSQL). - Strong Linux/Windows fundamentals and solid understanding of cloud security best practices. - Excellent communication and ability to lead in a geographically distributed environment. Preferred Qualifications - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. - Experience with AIOps, observability, and SRE and/or platform engineering practices. Interested? Apply now. We look forward to receiving your application.