Director of Technical Operations Job Description

A Director of Technical Operations answers the question every executive eventually asks: is production up, and if not, when will it be back? The job covers the systems customers and employees depend on, including cloud accounts, colocation cages, networks, databases, monitoring and the deployment pipeline that moves code into all of it. At a software company that means the hosted product. At a bank, a hospital system or a retailer it can mean the internal platforms that keep payments, records and stores running.

The director rarely carries a pager, but owns the system built around the pager. That starts with written reliability targets. Working with product and engineering leaders, the director agrees on service level objectives for each important service, then decides what the organization does when a service misses them: slow releases, move engineers onto reliability work, or accept the risk in writing. Incident management sits next to that. The director defines severity levels, trains incident commanders, sets the rules for when customers hear about an outage, and makes sure every serious incident ends in a blameless review with action items that actually close.

People make up the other half of the job. Depending on the company, the managers of site reliability engineering, infrastructure, network operations and platform engineering report to this director, each group with an on-call rotation of its own. Designing rotations people can live with, deciding when to hire and when to automate, and growing senior engineers into managers all belong to the role.

Toil is the word operations leaders use for repetitive manual work that grows with traffic and leaves nothing behind. Google's Site Reliability Engineering book describes an advertised goal of keeping operational work below 50% of each SRE's time, with the rest spent on engineering that removes future toil or adds service features. A company does not have to adopt that exact cap, but a technical operations director needs some version of it, or the team's hours drift toward tickets and repeat fixes.

Money and contracts take a steady share of the week. Cloud bills, reserved capacity, software licenses, hosting agreements and managed service contracts roll up to this director, who forecasts them, explains variances to finance and negotiates renewals. A vendor's service credit clause is worth something only if someone tracks the outages that trigger it.

Compliance runs through all of it. Enterprise customers ask for SOC 2 reports, auditors ask for change records, and cloud services sold to federal agencies generally go through FedRAMP. The evidence those reviews want, from access logs to tested recovery plans, lives in the systems the technical operations group runs, so the director becomes a regular participant in audits and security reviews rather than a bystander to them.

BLS says computer and information systems managers typically need a bachelor's degree in computer science or information technology, along with related work experience, and that most jobs in the occupation require several years of experience in a related IT job. For the senior end, BLS notes that CTOs, IT directors and other senior-level managers usually need many years and extensive experience. A technical operations director fits that senior description.

Typical path. As a rough guide, the route runs through systems administration, network engineering, site reliability engineering or cloud infrastructure work, then several years leading a team, then managing managers. Owning a production service end to end, through outages, migrations and audits, is the core qualification. Candidates from software engineering can make the move when they have carried operational responsibility, such as running a platform team or serving as an incident commander.

Education. A bachelor's in computer science, information systems or engineering is the usual starting point. A master's degree or an MBA can help when the director role carries a large budget or a seat in executive planning, but it does not stand in for a record of running systems.

Technical depth the job calls for:

• Cloud architecture on at least one major platform (AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud): networking, identity and access policy, managed databases, autoscaling and cost controls.
• Observability: metrics, logs and traces, with enough command of tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or Splunk to judge whether an alert is signal or noise.
• Infrastructure as code and delivery: Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes and a CI/CD system, at the level needed to review designs and set standards.
• Incident practice: paging platforms, status pages, incident command roles and postmortem templates.
• Security and compliance: the controls behind SOC 2, ISO 27001 and, for federal cloud work, FedRAMP, plus the logging and access evidence auditors request.

Management skills. Building on-call programs and the pay or time-off policies attached to them, hiring senior engineers and first-line managers, running a budget with capital and operating lines, and explaining risk to executives who never open a dashboard.

Certifications. No credential is tied to the title, but several map to parts of the work: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (Microsoft), Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (Google Cloud), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (The Linux Foundation and CNCF), ITIL certifications (PeopleCert), CISSP (ISC2) and FinOps Certified Practitioner (FinOps Foundation). At director level they serve as evidence of depth in a specific area, not as a substitute for operating experience.

BLS projects employment of computer and information systems managers, the occupation used for this page's pay band, to grow 16 percent from 2025 to 2035, much faster than the average for all occupations. The agency expects about 53,500 openings a year on average over the decade. In explaining the growth, BLS points to businesses across industries ramping up IT infrastructure such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Each of those adds production systems that someone has to keep available, patched and recoverable, which is the core of technical operations.

BLS lists computer systems design and related services as the largest employer of the occupation at 19 percent, followed by finance and insurance and the information sector at 13 percent each and management of companies and enterprises at 10 percent. Pay inside the occupation also moves with the employer. In May 2025 BLS industry data, the median for computer and information systems managers was $202,250 at software publishers and $179,470 at computing infrastructure providers, data processing and web hosting firms. Those rows cover every manager in the occupation at those employers, and BLS does not break out technical operations directors.

For directors at companies that sell cloud services to federal agencies, 2026 brought a rule change worth planning around. FedRAMP's Consolidated Rules for 2026 state that FedRAMP 20x will replace FedRAMP Rev5. FedRAMP began accepting applications for 20x Class B and C certifications on Aug. 31, 2026. The consolidated rules take mandatory effect for all stakeholders on Jan. 1, 2027, subject to specific applicability and effective dates, and the timeline sets June 11, 2027 as the date FedRAMP no longer accepts applications for new Rev5 certifications. FedRAMP has also replaced the provider-side term "continuous monitoring" with "Ongoing Certification," saying the old term had become synonymous with vulnerability scans, that the requirements are far broader than before, and that failing to meet them will result in a loss of FedRAMP Certification. For an operations director, that places compliance evidence inside the daily work of change management, logging and monitoring rather than in a once-a-year scramble.

AI tooling adds a different kind of work. Assistants for alert triage, incident summaries and log search each raise questions a director has to answer: what production access the tool gets, what it may change on its own, how its mistakes get caught, and whether it measurably shortens recovery. Writing that policy, and checking the tools against it, sits with the person who already owns production change control.

The skills that keep their value are steady: knowing how systems fail, setting honest reliability targets, building on-call programs that do not burn people out, and translating outage risk into the money and customer terms executives use. From the director seat, the next steps run toward vice president of infrastructure or engineering, a CTO seat at a smaller firm, or a CIO role where operations sits inside IT. Some directors move sideways into security operations leadership or into program roles that run large data center exits and cloud migrations.

Dear Hiring Committee,

Please consider me for the Director of Technical Operations opening at Northfield Health Platforms. For the past several years I have led the site reliability and infrastructure teams at a payments software company, and the problems in your posting, uneven on-call load, unclear service targets and a growing compliance workload, are the same ones I was hired to fix there.

When I took over, our incident process lived in one senior engineer's head. I wrote severity definitions with the product leads, trained a rotation of incident commanders from across engineering, and moved every major outage into a blameless review with owners and due dates. Within a year the review backlog was empty and repeat incidents had become rare enough that we stopped tracking them weekly.

I also rebuilt how we spend. Working with finance, I set up monthly cloud cost reviews by service, retired idle environments and renegotiated our monitoring contract around what we actually used. The savings paid for two engineers who now work full time on automation that removes manual deployment and recovery steps.

On compliance, I ran the operations side of our first SOC 2 Type II audit and built the evidence collection into our change and access tooling, so the second audit took a fraction of the staff time. I would bring the same approach to the federal certification work your team is starting.

I manage through clear targets and short feedback loops, and I protect engineers' time for project work rather than letting tickets absorb it. I would welcome a conversation about where Northfield's operations need to be in two years and how I would get them there.

Sincerely, Jordan Alvarez