Head of Cloud Operations

Havoc is a leader in all-domain collaborative autonomy, specializing in military and commercial-grade autonomous systems for sea, air, and land. Their software-defined hardware approach enables real-time information sharing, adaptability, and continuous operation even in contested environments.

About the Role

HavocAI is seeking a Head of Cloud Operations to oversee change, release, incident, and reliability practices, ensuring systems remain dependable, auditable, and compliant as the company scales.

Reporting to the Director of Cloud and collaborating closely with the ISSO and engineering teams, this role involves defining approval and deployment processes for production changes, coordinating releases, managing incidents, and maintaining a trustworthy operational record.

The ideal candidate combines strong operational leadership with deep technical expertise to challenge assumptions, make high-pressure decisions, and translate security/compliance requirements into practical engineering processes.

What You’ll Do

SRE & DevOps Leadership

• Lead and manage SRE and DevOps teams, setting technical and operational direction across reliability, automation, and safe delivery.
• Hire, coach, and manage performance for engineers across both functions.
• Own reliability and delivery practices, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, on-call health, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation.
• Establish clear ownership and expectations for cloud reliability and delivery.
• Partner with engineering leaders to identify and prioritize systemic reliability risks.
• Build an engineering culture balancing speed, reliability, security, and operational discipline.

Change & Release Management

• Define and own change classes (standard, normal, emergency) with clear approval paths and requirements.
• Establish change approval processes, including impact assessments, rollback plans, and approval records.
• Integrate change management with GitOps workflows, using merged, signed, peer-reviewed pull requests as the foundation.
• Own maintenance windows, freeze periods, and emergency-change processes.
• Ensure production changes are traceable to approved requests, approvers, and rollback decisions.
• Manage release calendars, versioning strategies, and environment promotions.
• Establish pre-deployment verification requirements covering CI status, security scans, migrations, feature flags, and rollback triggers.
• Coordinate releases across Cloud Platform, Backend, Autonomy, and Frontend teams.
• Maintain complete, audit-ready deployment and release records.

Incident & Problem Management

• Own HavocAI’s incident management framework, including severity levels, escalation paths, and incident command.
• Establish clear authority and expectations for incident declaration and management.
• Run incident command during significant events, coordinating roles, communications, and stakeholder notifications.
• Own on-call health, alert quality, escalation practices, and operational readiness.
• Lead blameless post-incident reviews and ensure remediation actions are tracked and completed.
• Manage government-sponsor notification obligations for incidents affecting authorized systems.
• Distinguish between incidents and problems, driving analysis of recurring issues.
• Translate recurring operational issues into technical debt and remediation priorities.

Configuration, Baselines & Compliance

• Maintain authoritative records of deployed systems, including versions, digests, and dependencies.
• Synchronize deployment records with the ISSO’s system inventory.
• Establish system baselines and processes for detecting configuration drift.
• Produce audit-ready evidence for the ISSO, including change records, deployment logs, and incident reports.
• Track execution against POA&M commitments, ensuring remediation dates and commitments are met.
• Translate security/compliance controls into practical engineering processes.
• Build automation to reduce manual compliance work and improve reliability.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of experience in change management, release management, incident management, technical program management, service management, SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering.
• Experience leading or managing SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Strong understanding of modern cloud operations, software delivery, infrastructure automation, and production reliability.
• Experience establishing and operating change, release, and incident management processes in complex environments.
• Proven ability to coordinate complex initiatives across engineering teams and stakeholders.
• Technical fluency to evaluate impact assessments, deployment strategies, rollback plans, and root-cause analyses.
• Ability to remain calm, decisive, and directive during active incidents.
• Strong written communication skills for incident reports, documentation, and executive updates.
• Ability to create scalable processes that provide control without slowing engineering teams.
• Strong ownership, judgment, and comfort in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
• Must be a U.S. Citizen and obtain/maintain a U.S. Government security clearance.

Nice to Have

• Incident command experience in regulated, defense, government, or safety-relevant environments.
• Experience operating cloud systems subject to U.S. Government authorization or compliance requirements.
• Familiarity with POA&M, security authorization processes, configuration baselines, and audit evidence management.
• Experience with GitOps-based change and release processes.
• Knowledge of ITIL practices or equivalent hands-on experience in service management.
• Experience with tools like Jira, PagerDuty, status pages, runbook platforms, and incident management systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD platforms, observability systems, and modern cloud infrastructure.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 12 months, you will have:

• Established an enforced, practical change and release management process.
• Ensured every production change is traceable to the appropriate approval and deployment record.
• Created a consistent incident management framework with clear severity levels, ownership, and communication standards.
• Established effective post-incident practices with remediation actions tracked through completion.
• Improved the health and effectiveness of SRE, DevOps, on-call, and reliability practices.
• Created an automated and trustworthy record of deployed systems across authorized environments.
• Kept deployment records synchronized with the ISSO’s inventory and maintained audit-ready evidence.
• Established effective tracking and execution against POA&M remediation commitments.
• Built operational processes that strengthen reliability and compliance without unnecessary friction.