Cloud Operations Lead

Job Overview: Weatherford have a great opportunity for a Cloud Operations Lead to join the Team in Houston.  The Cloud Operations Lead is responsible for ​ leading Cloud operations to maintain hosted (SaaS) Software product offerings for Oil and Gas customers, by following on managing Onboarding tasks, system maintenance and upgrades and hosting support activities. ​ Responsibilities: Own end-to-end Cloud Operations for CygNet and ForeSite SaaS offerings, ensuring availability, performance, security, and cost efficiency. Lead day-to-day operations and ticket support: monitoring, incident response, escalation, and post-incident reviews with corrective/preventive actions. Define and maintain service objectives (SLAs), operational KPIs, and reporting for reliability, customer experience, and operational efficiency. Drive onboarding and tenant provisioning for new customers, including environment readiness, data migration coordination, and go-live checklists. Plan, coordinate, and execute releases, upgrades, and maintenance windows with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success; ensure change management and rollback readiness. Implement and continuously improve observability (logs/metrics/traces), alerting, runbooks, and automation to reduce toil and mean time to recover (MTTR). Own capacity planning and performance management (load testing coordination, scaling strategies, and bottleneck remediation). Own cloud cost governance (FinOps): budgets, tagging, cost allocation per product/tenant, optimization initiatives, and forecasting. Establish and maintain backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans; conduct regular DR tests and document results. Partner with IT Security/GRC to maintain compliance requirements (e.g., access controls, vulnerability management, audit evidence, and secure operations practices). Collaborate with customer OT/field teams and internal stakeholders to design and support secure OT-to-cloud connectivity and data flows, aligned with operational constraints and safety requirements. Manage and mentor the Cloud Operations team: hiring, goal setting, coaching, on-call schedules, training plans, and performance feedback. Manage vendors and cloud service providers as needed; oversee support contracts and coordinate with third-party hosting/managed services. Ensure operational readiness for new features and software by participating in design reviews and defining operational acceptance criteria. Support customer communications during incidents and planned maintenance, including status updates and executive-level summaries when required. Skills Required: Cloud operations leadership: incident/problem/change management and operational governance. Strong understanding of SaaS concepts: multi-tenancy, environments, release management, SLAs. Hands-on experience operating production workloads on a major cloud platform (AWS). Observability and monitoring: metrics, logs, traces, alert tuning, dashboards, and runbooks. Security operations fundamentals: IAM, least privilege, secrets management, patching, and vulnerability remediation. Knowledge of OT environments and industrial connectivity patterns (plant/field networks, SCADA/IIoT concepts), including safe integration between OT and cloud services. Understanding of IT/OT boundary controls: network segmentation, firewalls/DMZ, secure remote access, and data diode / one-way flow concepts where applicable. Automation and scripting (e.g., PowerShell, Python). Infrastructure-as-Code and configuration management practices (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation). Database and middleware operational knowledge (backup/restore, performance tuning, HA/DR patterns). Customer-facing communication skills for incidents, maintenance, and service reviews. Skills Preferred: Experience with regulated environments and audit support (SOC 2 or similar). Familiarity with OT standards and protocols (e.g., OPC UA, Modbus, MQTT) and implications for secure data acquisition and telemetry to cloud/SaaS platforms. Oil & gas domain familiarity and experience supporting field operations software in production. Qualifications & Experience Required: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. 5+ years of experience in IT/OT/Cloud operations, including supporting customer-facing production applications. 3+ years of people leadership experience (leading teams, on-call, coaching, and performance management). Demonstrated experience running incident response and implementing root cause remediation. Experience coordinating change/release activities and communicating with stakeholders and customers. Manage on-call rotation and availability to support critical incidents outside business hours when needed. Ability to work with distributed teams and coordinate across Time zones. Ability to handle sensitive customer and production data according to company security policies. Qualifications & Experience Preferred: Experience o