Head of Cloud Operations

ABOUT US:

Havoc is a leader in all-domain collaborative autonomy. Its software-defined hardware approach powers military and commercial-grade autonomous systems across sea, air, and land to sense, decide, and act together in complex and contested environments. Havoc connects assets, enabling them to share information, adapt in real time, and continue operating even when communications are disrupted or denied. Havoc optimizes mission performance and minimizes human risk.

Havoc was founded in 2024 and headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. Learn more at Havoc: All-Domain Collaborative Autonomy http://havocai.com/ .

ABOUT THE ROLE

HavocAI is seeking a Head of Cloud Operations to own the change, release, incident, and reliability practices that keep our systems dependable, auditable, and compliant as we scale.

Reporting to the Director of Cloud and partnering closely with the ISSO and engineering teams, you will define how production changes are approved and deployed, how releases are coordinated, how incidents are managed, and how we maintain a trustworthy record of what is running across our environments.

You will also lead our SRE and DevOps teams, setting direction across reliability, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, observability, and safe delivery. This role requires someone who can build disciplined processes without creating unnecessary bureaucracy—using automation and engineering practices wherever possible to make the right way of working the easiest way of working.

The ideal candidate combines strong operational leadership with enough technical depth to challenge assumptions, make decisions under pressure, and translate security and compliance requirements into practical engineering processes.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

SRE & DEVOPS LEADERSHIP

• Lead and manage the SRE and DevOps teams, setting technical and operational direction across reliability, automation, and safe delivery.

• Hire, coach, develop, and manage performance for engineers across both functions.

• Own reliability and delivery practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, on-call health, CI/CD, and infrastructure automation.

• Establish clear ownership and operating expectations across cloud reliability and delivery.

• Partner with engineering leaders to identify systemic reliability risks and prioritize improvements.

• Build an engineering culture that balances speed, reliability, security, and operational discipline.

CHANGE & RELEASE MANAGEMENT

• Define and own change classes—including standard, normal, and emergency changes—with clear approval paths and requirements.

• Establish and operate an appropriate change approval process, including impact assessments, rollback plans, and approval records.

• Integrate change management with GitOps workflows, using merged, signed, peer-reviewed pull requests as the foundation of the change record.

• Own maintenance windows, freeze periods, and emergency-change processes, including retroactive approvals where appropriate.

• Ensure production changes are traceable to an approved request, approver, and rollback decision.

• Own the release calendar, versioning strategy, and promotion across environments and tenants.

• Establish pre-deployment verification requirements covering CI status, security scans, migrations, feature flags, and predefined rollback triggers.

• Coordinate releases across Cloud Platform, Backend, Autonomy, and Frontend teams to prevent conflicts and manage dependencies.

• Maintain complete, audit-ready deployment and release records.

INCIDENT & PROBLEM MANAGEMENT

• Own HavocAI’s incident management framework, including incident declaration, severity levels, escalation paths, and incident command.

• Establish clear authority and expectations for declaring and managing incidents.

• Run incident command during significant events, coordinating roles, communications, escalation, and stakeholder or customer notifications.

• Own on-call health, alert quality, e