Head of Cloud Platform Engineering

Totara is a global learning platform trusted by more than 1,500 organisations and 21 million users worldwide. We help organisations build workforce readiness through flexible learning, compliance, and talent development solutions designed for complex and highly regulated environments across both the public and private sectors. 

We're at an exciting point in our journey. As we continue to evolve our platform and expand our SaaS offering, we're investing in the engineering foundations that will support the next phase of our growth. 

About the role 

This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of Totara's cloud platform. 

Historically, our software has been released annually and deployed in a variety of ways by both Totara and our partners. Today, we're evolving towards operating our platform as a modern SaaS service: continuously delivered, consistently operated, and available wherever our customers need us around the world. 

We're clear on where we're heading, but how we get there is still being built. As Head of Cloud Platform Engineering, you'll play a central role in defining that journey. 

Today our infrastructure capability spans multiple teams, regions, and platforms, including environments inherited through acquisition. These teams have built valuable expertise, and your role will be to bring them together behind a shared operating model, common engineering standards, and a platform that enables our product teams to move faster with confidence. 

You'll lead the teams responsible for how we provision, deploy, operate, observe, secure, and optimise the infrastructure that supports our global customer base. 

Unlike many SaaS businesses, our customers run on dedicated deployments rather than shared multi-tenant infrastructure. Operating thousands of isolated environments efficiently, securely, and economically is one of the most interesting challenges this role will tackle. 

Today we're primarily AWS-based, with multi-cloud capability becoming an important next step. Our customers include governments and highly regulated organisations with specific regional, sovereignty, and compliance requirements, so expanding our cloud footprint is driven by genuine customer need rather than technology for technology's sake. 

What you'll be responsible for:

Bringing teams together 

• Build a unified operating model across our infrastructure and cloud engineering teams.  
• Establish shared engineering standards, on-call practices, and ways of working.  
• Champion engineering excellence across infrastructure as code, peer review, operational readiness, and change management.  
• Build, coach, and develop a high-performing distributed team.  

Building a scalable platform 

• Own the platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to provision, deploy, and operate services without reinventing infrastructure.  
• Define and improve our service reliability through clear SLOs, recovery objectives, and operational practices.  
• Make observability a core part of every platform capability, with logging, metrics, tracing, and operational runbooks built in from the start.  
• Continuously reduce operational toil through automation, self-service, and self-healing systems so that growth doesn't require proportional operational effort.  

Modernising our infrastructure 

• Lead the infrastructure migration towards our target operating model through incremental, low-risk delivery.  
• Develop repeatable, automated lifecycle management for our dedicated customer deployments, with clear isolation and resilience built in.  

Cloud architecture and cost 

• Own the architecture, security, resilience, and operational effectiveness of our AWS estate.  
• Embed FinOps into everyday engineering decisions, helping us understand and improve the economics of operating our SaaS platform at scale.  

Security and compliance 

• Work closely with security and engineering leaders to ensure our platform is secure, compliant, and resilient by default.  
• Support the evidence, auditability, and regional data residency requirements expected by enterprise, government, and regulated customers.  

Multi-cloud strategy 

• Lead our expansion into additional cloud providers where customer requirements make this necessary.  
• Build portability where it adds genuine value, while keeping the platform pragmatic and avoiding unnecessary complexity.  

What success looks like:

Within your first six months 

• Infrastructure teams are working within a shared operating model, with common standards and on-call practices.  
• A clear, costed, phased migration plan is agreed and early delivery is underway.  
• Executive reporting includes meaningful visibility of service reliability and cloud unit economics.  

Within your first year 

• Automated provisioning and lifecycle management for our target platform is operating successfully in production.  
• Operational effort grows significantly more slowly than our customer base.  
• The platform engineering organisation is working as one team with a strong engineering culture and consistently high standards.  

What we're looking for:

We're looking for someone who combines deep technical expertise with thoughtful leadership and a passion for building great engineering organisations.  You'll likely bring experience including: 

• Leading platform or infrastructure engineering within a growing B2B SaaS business.  
• Deep hands-on AWS expertise across infrastructure as code (such as Terraform), containers, orchestration, networking, and cloud security.  
• Experience designing and operating dedicated customer or cell-based deployment models, with a strong understanding of isolation, resilience, and operational economics.  
• A strong Site Reliability Engineering mindset, including service levels, incident management, observability, and operational excellence.  
• Practical FinOps experience, with a track record of improving cloud cost efficiency.  
• Leading and growing distributed engineering teams across multiple locations, including bringing together teams following organisational change or acquisition.  
• Experience working within regulated industries where security, compliance, and governance are fundamental design considerations.  
• Real-world experience delivering multi-cloud platforms, with good judgement about when portability genuinely adds value.  

It would be great if you also have 

• Experience transitioning products from hosted or self-managed deployments to fully managed SaaS.  
• Experience building platforms or ecosystems that enable partners or third parties to extend products.  
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, IRAP, or similar.  

Why Join Totara?

• Lead a strategic function with strong executive support.
• Shape the future of security, trust and resilience for a global SaaS platform.
• Work with talented colleagues across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US.
• Flexible and hybrid ways of working.

Perks and Benefits:

• Unlimited PTO
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Professional Development Opportunities
• Annual Wellbeing Allowance
• New Joiner home working set-up allowance
• Additional Paid Leave: Birthday off, Working days between Christmas and New Years Eve

At Totara, we believe diverse perspectives make us stronger. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and experiences. If you're excited about this opportunity but don't meet every requirement, we'd still love to hear from you. We hire based on skills, leadership, potential and the unique experiences people bring to our team.