Manager, Cloud Platform Engineering

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) applies cutting-edge technology to operating a reliable electricity system, managing competitive markets for wholesale electricity, and planning for the Empire State's energy future.  The NYISO’s Information Technology department invites applications for a full-time Manager, Cloud Platform Engineering.  

The Manager, Cloud Platform Engineering leads the team that builds, operates, and continuously improves NYISO’s shared cloud platform, including the Kubernetes/EKS foundation, AWS infrastructure-as-code, delivery tooling, reliability practices, and platform services that application teams use to deploy and operate software.

The Manager is responsible for treating the internal cloud platform as a service, with defined consumers, operational expectations, service-level objectives, and a forward-looking roadmap. This includes providing application teams with secure, reliable, cost-effective, and self-service paths to build, deploy, and operate applications on NYISO’s cloud platform.

The role owns the Site Reliability Engineering practice, the EKS/container platform, shared delivery tooling, and the security, compliance, and operational controls embedded across the platform and delivery lifecycle. This includes production ownership for the cloud platform with 24x7 accountability, on-call participation, incident triage, and leadership of service restoration activities.

The Manager ensures platform operations align with NYISO’s incident, change, and problem management processes, with accountability for the lifecycle management of platform-related tickets, changes, operational issues, and service improvements.

The Manager develops and manages platform budgets, including multi-year capital and operating forecasts, cloud consumption planning, tooling costs, and vendor-related expenses. This role partners with Procurement and other stakeholders on vendor agreements, cloud service agreements, renewals, prioritization, escalation, and performance oversight for cloud and platform tooling providers.

The role is accountable for delivery execution across the platform roadmap, including providing estimates, managing execution plans, coordinating cross-team dependencies, and ensuring roadmap commitments are delivered in alignment with organizational priorities. The Manager maintains roadmap artifacts, provides regular progress updates, and defines and reports platform performance, reliability, adoption, delivery, and cost metrics to IT leadership.

This role collaborates across the organization to understand business requirements, drive cloud and platform-engineering best practices, support audit and regulatory obligations, and advance the operating-model shift toward AI-assisted, plan-first, human-validated engineering.

 

ESSENTIAL DUTIES and RESPONSIBILITIES

 

Platform Strategy, Architecture, and Roadmap

• Platform-as-a-Product: Own the internal developer platform as a product by defining consumers, service offerings, paved-road delivery paths, service-level objectives, and a roadmap aligned with NYISO’s business, technology, and cloud migration goals.
• Architecture and Standards: Guide scalable, resilient, secure, and performant cloud and container architectures; establish reusable, secure-by-default standards, templates, automation, and policy-as-code.
• Roadmap Governance: Maintain platform roadmap artifacts, prioritize capabilities, track delivery progress, and communicate status, risks, dependencies, and decisions to IT leadership and stakeholders.

Team Leadership and Operating Model

• Team Development: Attract, develop, mentor, and retain cloud, platform, DevOps, and reliability engineering talent.
• Performance and Culture: Set clear goals, provide regular feedback, manage performance, and foster a collaborative, innovative, security-conscious, operationally disciplined, and results-oriented team environment.

Delivery Execution and Technical Oversight

• Delivery Oversight: Manage execution of platform initiatives, cloud migrations, modernization efforts, and optimization projects, including estimates, execution plans, dependencies, risks, and delivery commitments.
• Technical Execution: Oversee troubleshooting and resolution of complex issues across the cloud platform, Kubernetes environment, delivery tooling, and related infrastructure services.
• Infrastructure as Code and Automation: Champion Infrastructure as Code and platform automation using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, Helm, CI/CD tooling, and related technologies.
• Cost Optimization: Drive cloud cost optimization, resource efficiency, consumption management, and cost transparency across platform services.

Production Operations, Service Management

• Production Ownership: Own platform production support with 24x7 accountability, including on-call participation, incident triage, escalation coordination, and service restoration leadership.
• Service Management: Ensure platform operations align with NYISO’s incident, change, and problem management processes; own lifecycle management for platform-related tickets, changes, operational issues, and service improvements.
• Observability and Toil Reduction: Own monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboard standards; use automation and self-service to reduce operational toil and improve mean time to detection and recovery.

Container Platform and Shared Delivery Tooling

• Container Platform Operations: Ensure the EKS/container platform is reliable, secure, observable, supportable, and aligned with application team needs.
• Supply-Chain Security: Drive container image hardening, vulnerability scanning, dependency management, and software-supply-chain security across the build and runtime environment.
• Shared Delivery Tooling: Own shared delivery capabilities, including CI/CD pipeline libraries, deployment automation, operational and compliance tooling, ingress/sidecar tooling, starter services, documentation, and self-service patterns.

Cross-Functional Collaboration and Innovation

• Stakeholder Management: Build strong relationships with application development, operations, security, architecture, infrastructure, audit, procurement, finance, and business teams.
• Requirements and Enablement: Translate business, technical, operational, security, and compliance needs into platform capabilities; support application teams with cloud migrations, container adoption, operational readiness, and effective use of shared platform services.
• Cloud and Platform Advocacy: Promote platform engineering, cloud adoption, reliability practices, automation, secure-by-default delivery, and self-service delivery patterns across the organization.

 

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES

This position does possess supervisory responsibility and there are non-supervisory employees who report to this position.

 

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s degree (B.S.) in Computer Science, Engineering; or equivalent combination of education, training and experience; Master’s degree (M.S./MBA) desirable.
• At least 10 years of experience of various architectural domains (application, data, infrastructure, and security) and cloud solution design, implementation, and operation.
• Must have proven experience in a leadership or managerial role, with a demonstrated ability to lead and inspire cross-functional teams.
• Deep expertise in managing production-grade Kubernetes clusters, deployment strategies, and resource optimization.
• Proven track record in designing and implementing cloud infrastructure on a major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• String working knowledge of containerization technologies (Docker) and Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Cloudformation, etc.).
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders effectively.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a focus on driving results and delivering value to the organization.
• Experience in strategic planning, technology roadmap development and budgeting.
• Familiarity with project management principles and practices.

 

CERTIFICATES, LICENSES, REGISTRATIONS

N/A

 

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

• Ability to read, analyze and interpret common professional, scientific and/or technical journals, financial reports, and legal documents. Ability to respond to common inquiries or complaints from staff, management, customers, regulatory agencies, or members of the business community. Ability to write presentations and articles for publication that conform to prescribed style and format. Ability to effectively present information to top management, market participants, other public groups and/or boards of directors. Ability to effectively communicate and explain corporate and department strategy to multiple
• Strong collaboration, influencing, and leadership skills.
• Ability to apply principles of logical or scientific thinking to a wide range of intellectual and practical problems.
• Expert user of all computer-based management tools (such as MS Office, Email, shareware,

wireless devices, workflow tools, etc.).

• Proven history of attracting and developing superior
• Experience in managing vendor

 

PHYSICAL DEMANDS

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to talk or hear.  The employee frequently is required to stand, walk, sit and use hands to perform routine office tasks.  The employee is occasionally required to reach with hands and arms.  The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 15 pounds. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

 

WORK ENVIRONMENT

The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate. Contact with staff and public will occur. Travel may be required to attend and/or conduct meetings, conferences and training.­­­­­­­­­­­­ This position may require work on nights, weekends or holidays.

 

At the NYISO, we realize the importance of balancing the availability of remote work with the inherent value of bringing people together to attain success in the areas of maximum collaboration, relationship building and growth, teamwork, innovation and problem solving, as well as professional development and mentoring. In this role, you will be required to work onsite from our Rensselaer, NY location several days per workweek, with the option to work remotely on the remaining days. You will also be expected to respond to all business needs that may require any increase to the regular onsite requirements.

The NYISO takes pride in recruiting, developing and retaining highly talented individuals. In addition to competitive salaries, we offer a comprehensive benefits package and innovative reward programs.

All offers of employment will be made contingent upon the successful completion of a drug screening and background check.

 The NYISO is an Equal Opportunity Employer and as such, does not discriminate in its hiring or employment practices.

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