The VP of Technical Operations is a critical business role within SendGrid and is responsible for ensuring that our software is always running for our customers.  Achieving this simply stated goal will require tremendous technical depth and managerial chops because of the scale and complexity of our solution.  It isn’t easy to send 2% of the Internet’s email traffic and you should be up for that challenge.  We manage multiple data centers of our own and leverage external providers for elasticity.  You should have experience with both and an understanding of the tradeoffs between them.  You will have to bring a working knowledge of the latest SaaS stack, a passion for operational excellence and redundant architectures, and a hunger to grow and mentor a team that is eagerly anticipating your leadership.  While keeping the lights on is critical, this job is not just about the day to day; it is expected that you will contribute significantly to our strategic vision.

What You’ll Do

• Live by and champion our cultural values of Happy, Hungry, Honest, and Humble
• Lead, coach, and mentor a team of Infrastructure Engineers, DBAs, and DevOps Engineers who support SendGrid’s cloud applications and services
• Direct all activities associated with infrastructure performance and reliability including capacity planning, trends, and application performance
• Monitor and model system stability, performance, and throughput
• Design infrastructure for high reliability and availability.  
• Plan for continued improvement of cloud architecture and operations
• Automate the deployment and maintenance of cloud platform technologies
• Collaborate with information security on core enterprise security strategy
• Manage a significant capital budget with an eye towards improving our gross margin
• Manage vendor relationships, including contract negotiations
• Work within our senior leadership team to shape the strategy for the SendGrid business
• We're an agile, fast growing company and this job description isn't meant to be a complete list of your qualifications or all of the things you'll do

Work experience and education sufficient to clearly demonstrate that you:

• Embody the 4 H’s: Humble, Honest, Hungry, Happy
• Provide calm in the face of a storm
• Are a gifted manager of people who can handle strong personalities and get the most out of their team
• Exceptional teacher / mentor
• Empathetic; listens first
• Proficient in multi-site management
• Can drive tough change both directly and indirectly.  
• Agent of change
• Collaborative
• Decisive
• Confident
• Are business focused
• Can set the organization’s strategy & direction
• Understand the balance between Product & Operations needs
• Have managed large budgets & vendor relations.  Cost conscious
• Use data to make decisions
• Have a customer-first mindset
• Have breadth of experience in Ops — IaaS, PaaS, DevOps, InfoSec
• High scale experience
• Have dealt with complex technical environments
• Have had exposure to multiple Ops organizations