Director Cloud Services

About Coalfire   Coalfire is on a mission to make the world a safer place by solving our clients’ hardest cybersecurity challenges. We work at the cutting edge of technology to advise, assess, automate, and ultimately help companies navigate the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape. We are headquartered in Chicago, Illinois with offices across the U.S. and U.K., and we support clients around the world.   But that’s not who we are – that’s just what we do.   We are thought leaders, consultants, and cybersecurity experts, but above all else, we are a team of passionate problem-solvers who are hungry to learn, grow, and make a difference.

POSITION SUMMARY:

The Director of Cloud Services is a leader professional and managed services teams driving customer-centric outcomes. The Director, Cloud Services can lead complex client engagements and help our teams deliver measurable outcomes across the cloud services portfolio. In this role, you will build trusted client relationships, shape well-defined scopes, and create the alignment needed to move engagements forward with confidence. You will support developing and executing the roll out of engineering governance mechanisms, establishing standards for training, evaluating, and managing the teams, and ensure the team has the guidance and technical details for executing their day to day tasks.

As the Director, Cloud Services, you will provide client-facing, commercial, technical, and delivery leadership across the full engagement lifecycle. You will translate client needs into executable approaches, interface effectively with project management, sales, and engineering teams, remove technical and delivery roadblocks, and ensure that engineering commitments are clearly understood and consistently delivered. This role requires strong technical fluency and sound judgment, but day-to-day hands-on engineering is not the primary expectation, you are able to evaluate engineers and architects on their performance. You will also serve as a trusted technical partner to Sales, Advisory, Security, and other cross-functional teams.

This role requires a deep understanding of engineering operations, customer advocacy, and strategic business alignment to help organizations optimize their security posture. The Director will collaborate with clients, executive leadership, and technical teams to develop security engineering strategies, improve customer adoption, and enhance product-market alignment. Additionally, this role includes public speaking, cybersecurity evangelism, and leading go-to-market (GTM) initiatives to strengthen brand presence and community engagement.

What You'll Do

Client Leadership, Delivery Excellence, and Quality and Risk Management

• Serve as a senior client-facing leader for the team across cloud engineering engagements, establishing trust, setting expectations, and maintaining clear communication with technical and executive stakeholders.
• Own engagement momentum and delivery excellence by monitoring scope, milestones, risks, dependencies, quality, and client satisfaction; take prompt action when outcomes are at risk.
• Lead high-priority client escalations and difficult conversations with professionalism, transparency, and a focus on practical resolution and long-term relationship health.
• Ensure client commitments are understood across delivery teams and that engagement decisions, tradeoffs, status, and next steps are communicated clearly and consistently.
• Own engineering quality, risk management, technical readiness, design quality, implementation quality, and corrective actions for recurring delivery issues, using the standards approved by Cloud Services leadership.
• Implement engineering standards for architecture, engineering, and operational readiness. You will own implementation and adoption of those approved standards across the teams, in collaboration with peers and other delivery operational teams.
  • Ensure clear technical handoffs across teams (internal and external) so implementation and ongoing support remain connected as a seemless delivery model.
  • Participate and support established backlog management, prioritization, dependency, work-in-progress, and recovery practices across our project. Provide standards, oversight, and collaboration amongst the teams to high-light concerns, address risks and mitigations, and recommended next steps.

  Sales Support, Scoping, Solution Shaping, and Thought Leadership

  • Partner with Sales and pre-sales teams to lead discovery, understand client business and technical challenges, assess delivery feasibility, and shape compelling cloud services approaches.
  • Develop and review scopes of work, estimates, assumptions, dependencies, milestones, and acceptance criteria so proposed work is commercially sound and executable.
  • Translate complex cloud engineering and cloud security concepts into clear recommendations for clients, sellers, executives, and delivery teams without losing the important technical or commercial details.
  • Identify scope, staffing, schedule, and delivery risks early; establish mitigation plans and ensure that proposed commitments are aligned to available capabilities and client outcomes.
  • Marketing support and enablement – clearly articular our GTM and value proposition to internal and extneral stakeholders
  • Drive business growth for our customers and understanding their business and GTM needs, and how Coalfire can support their initiatives
  • Support sales lifecycles when delivery input is required by working with Sales and customers to validate technical content in SOWs (e.g., Approach and Methodogy, timelines, outputs, deliverables, pricing, resourcing, etc), Change Orders, and Contracts and create accurate delivery inputs for deals.
    • Confirm the accuracy of technical information in SOWs, Change Orders, and Contracts and coordinate corrections with the authorized Sales owners.
    • You maintain decision-making authority on practice pricing, contract gross margins, and discounting up to the allowable based on your role.  
    • Oversee customer feedback loops, working with product, sales, and marketing teams to refine offerings based on market demands.
    • Act as an industry thought leader, delivering presentations, blogs, and community-driven outreach efforts.

    Technical Leadership, Engagement Execution, Operating Model and Governance

    • Interface with engineering and consulting teams to understand risks around proposed architecture, implementation challenges, security considerations, and delivery constraints, while serving as an effective bridge between technical teams and clients where necessary.
    • Build scalable operating processes, playbooks, and governance that improve consistency, predictability, and quality across Cloud Services engagements.
    • Push through technical and organizational roadblocks by clarifying decisions, aligning the right experts, escalating appropriately, and maintaining accountability through resolution.
    • Provide technical and delivery leadership across cloud services engagements, promoting practical standards, reusable approaches, strong documentation, and continuous improvement.
    • Use technical fluency and business judgment to evaluate options, explain tradeoffs, and keep engagements moving even when requirements, technology, or stakeholder priorities are complex.
    • Own training, new-hire enablement, role-based onboarding, career and growth pathways, promotion readiness, performance expectations, and succession coverage for all members on the team.
    • Establish technical qualification, onboarding, work allocation, quality review, and performance expectations for subcontractors and delivery partners
    • Serve as the accountable Delivery leader for customer and internal escalations involving quality, delivery delays, architecture or implementation risk, performance, or unmet contractual commitments.
    • Support client management, escalations, CSAT issues, QBRs, and transition conversations when engineering context is required; coordinate the right technical leader for action item, follow through, and recovery actions.
    • Maintain accurate internal tracking of engineering commitments, effort, status, risks, dependencies, resource needs, and recovery actions across engagements.
    • Join client, sales, QBR, workshop, transition, and escalation conversations when technical authority is required; assign the appropriate technical leader instead of becoming the default owner of every issue.
    • Create repeatable systems that reduce dependency on individual experts and move lower-level delivery friction to the appropriate engineering leader.
    • Provide executive-level briefings, helping leadership teams understand risk, issues, and mitigations.
    • Ensure rollout and adherence to tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure customer success, operational excellance, and delivery quality.

    Team Leadership, Capacity Planning, and Cross-Functional Collaboration

    • Lead through influence across delivery teams, delivery operations, and other partners to coordinate integrated solutions and deliver on client commitments.
    • Directly support and provide coaching for teams on client engagement, scoping, communication, accountability, and delivery practices; provide feedback and escalation support that improve performance and strengthen the Cloud Services organization.
    • Work with Delivery Operations, RDM, PMO, and Offering Management to implement their approved requirements, controls, and systems within Cloud Services.
    • Provide engineering demand, skills, capacity, staffing, utilization, subcontractor, dependency, and delivery-readiness inputs to RDM, Delivery Operations, and PMO.
    • Provide technical inputs to cross-functional teams (e.g., Offering Management, Sales, and the Cloud Services leadership) for service readiness, scope, staffing, effort, assumptions, dependencies, and pricing feasibility.

What You'll Bring

Strategic Leadership & Advisory: Ability to develop, communicate, and execute Cloud engineering strategies for organizations.

Proven leadership experience with cloud engineering, security engineering, consulting, or managed services delivery teams.

Strong knowledge of cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, security controls, vulnerability mgmt., operations, and technical delivery governance.

Demonstrated experience managing managers, architects, senior engineers, and technical workstreams across multiple engagements.

Experience implementing approved engineering standards, quality controls, backlog discipline, technical capacity requirements, and escalation recovery.

Experience supporting sales lifecycles, validating technical scope and commercial inputs, and translating engineering effort into accurate pricing.

Strong client communication, technical judgment, prioritization, and people-leadership skills.

Customer Success & Engagement: Proven expertise in driving customer satisfaction, security adoption, and retention.

Public Speaking & Cybersecurity Evangelism: Experience in conference presentations, blogging, and community engagement.

Go-To-Market Strategy & Product Success: Ability to align cybersecurity solutions with market demands and customer needs.

Executive-Level Communication: Skilled in translating complex security concepts into actionable business insights

8+ years in managing consulting, cloud engineering, strategy, or leadership roles.

Strong experience and proven success establishing delivery standards and improving operational performance across a cloud services portfolio.

Experience with executive engagement, thought leadership, and security and engineering enablement programs.

Direct experience leading cloud services delivery teams or organizations.

Background in customer-facing roles, with experience managing client escalations, delivery governance, or high-level technical discussions.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS:

Relevant certifications in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), IT service management (ITIL), architecture (TOGAF), or related disciplines are preferred.

Why You’ll Want to Join Us   At Coalfire, you’ll find the support you need to thrive personally and professionally. In many cases, we provide a flexible work model that empowers you to choose when and where you’ll work most effectively – whether you’re at home or an office.   Regardless of location, you’ll experience a company that prioritizes connection and wellbeing and be part of a team where people care about each other and our communities. You’ll have opportunities to join employee resource groups, participate in in-person and virtual events, and more. And you’ll enjoy competitive perks and benefits to support you and your family, like paid parental leave, flexible time off, certification and training reimbursement, digital mental health and wellbeing support membership, and comprehensive insurance options.   At Coalfire, equal opportunity and pay equity is integral to the way we do business. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. Coalfire is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. To request reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, contact our Human Resources team at HumanResourcesMB@coalfire.com.