Reports to the Chief Financial Officer
THE ROLE
AKUVO is creating a new role - VP, IT & Infrastructure - to own every layer of the Azure environment the company runs on. Three connected scopes, all under one leader:
- The production SaaS platform. The Azure-hosted environment that AKUVO's customers depend on - reliability, performance, scaling, observability, cost, and the customer-data-center connections that keep regulated financial institutions integrated.
- The product's infrastructure surface. The cloud architecture decisions that shape what the product engineering and data teams can build - networking, identity, secrets, environments, deployment paths.
- The internal company environment. The Microsoft 365 estate, Intune-managed devices, SharePoint and Teams, Power Platform automation, and the Copilot agents that AKUVO's own employees use to do their jobs.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead the team that operates AKUVO's production and internal Azure environment - App Services, Container Apps, Azure SQL, Entra ID, Application Gateway, and the networking layer that fronts the platform.
- Own reliability, performance, and capacity - meet customer commitments, and run the monitoring, alerting, incident-response, and postmortem practice behind them.
- Manage customer-data-center connectivity - VPN tunnels, Azure Virtual WAN, and firewall posture, with playbooks that make new customer turn-ups fast and predictable.
- Lead the agentic operations agenda - Copilot in Azure, AI-driven monitoring and remediation, and automated runbooks that take recurring work (database setup, VPN config, certificate and secret rotation, IP whitelisting) off people's plates.
- Own the cost line - manage the Azure footprint's operating cost, remove waste without hurting availability or performance, and bring a defensible cost-to-serve view to the committee quarterly.
- Run the corporate Microsoft 365 estate - SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Entra ID & Intune.
- Own end-user support and IT operations - set the bar for response time and experience so working at AKUVO doesn't mean fighting the tools.
- Lead the Power Platform and internal automation function - Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse, governed - and treat recurring manual work as a defect to eliminate.
- Lead the team through the agentic transition - identify the work an agent can do, automate it, free people for higher-leverage work, and be honest enough to bring them along.
- Partner with the SVP, Data and Analytics Engineering - the data franchise runs on the production tenant, so Fabric and its networking, identity, and cost posture all touch this role.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 5+ years in cloud, IT, or infrastructure operations with hands-on ownership of a production cloud environment or a meaningful slice of one. Total career experience typically 7-10 years.
- Production cloud at scale: a customer-facing SaaS environment on Azure (or comparable cloud) where uptime and performance were contractually committed and measured. Regulated industry experience a bonus.
- Owned or directly overseen the corporate Microsoft 365 estate, device management, identity, and end-user support as a primary function, not a side responsibility.
- Experience leading teams.
- Deep, current Azure expertise: App Services, Function Apps, Container Apps, Azure SQL, Entra ID, Application Gateway, networking, and the monitoring stack - leveling up the team, not learning in the role.
- Infrastructure-as-code as muscle memory: Bicep, ARM, or Terraform.
- Microsoft 365 and the digital workplace: SharePoint, Teams, Intune, Autopilot, Entra, Purview - opinionated on Power Platform governance and Copilot agents.
- Networking and security fundamentals: VPN, VWAN, segmentation, identity, secrets, certificates - credible in an architecture review.
NICE TO HAVE
- Hands-on with agentic operations and AI-driven automation: Microsoft Copilot in Azure, Copilot for Security, Copilot Studio, Power Platform agents - with projects that removed real manual work.
- Regulated financial services: Direct experience as a vendor to banks, credit unions, or fintech lenders - or inside one. Understanding of what a customer InfoSec questionnaire looks like, why SOC 2 matters, and what a regulator-driven third-party risk review feels like.
