Associate Director/Director, Development Systems

What if… you could tell the story of an organization that conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category bioplatform companies to transform human health and sustainability?

Since its launch in 2000 Flagship Pioneering has, through its Flagship Pioneering Labs unit, applied its unique hypothesis-driven innovation process to originate and foster more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in over $130 billion in aggregate value. To date, Flagship has deployed over $2.5 billion in capital toward the founding and growth of its pioneering companies alongside more than $19 billion of follow-on investments from other institutions.

Flagship Pioneering presents compelling opportunities for impact-focused technology professionals:

• The Flagship Labs ecosystem is composed of new and growing companies with widely varying needs that span all aspects of technology, presenting incredible opportunities for learning, development and influencing the trajectory of dozens of companies.
• Flagship believes that the sophisticated use of modern digital and data technologies is a strategic differentiator for companies, with the potential to significantly alter their research, productivity, market position and long-term success. To deliver on this mission, Flagship seeks individuals who have a proven track record of solving enterprise-scale challenges while thriving in a dynamic startup culture.

Position Summary

The Associate Director, Cloud Platform Operations will report to the Vice President, Data & Systems Engineering and has overall responsibility for the implementation, administration and day-to-day operations of public cloud (e.g. AWS) accounts used by Flagship Pioneering and our portfolio companies.

In this important role, you’ll create a roadmap for cloud operational excellence that emphasizes the practical needs of young, rapidly growing biotech companies, balancing stability and security with productivity and innovation. You’ll manage our relationships with cloud vendors and service providers and work closely with members of the Flagship Digital team as well as portfolio company leaders.

The successful candidate will have expertise in AWS, software development and a strong background in IT service management. You’ll also have a quantitative mindset with a keen ability to define and refine metrics that matter.

The position will emphasize design, development, training and administration. A typical day could include collaborating with architects on tagging policies for OUs, launching new AWS accounts for portfolio companies, managing MSPs to ensure high-quality user support, creating process diagrams, documenting guidelines and developing training materials, advising companies on cloud disaster recovery plans appropriate to their business, writing Python code to automate the retrieval of information from dozens of AWS accounts, reviewing automated audit results with CISO and executing action plans, presenting portfolio-wide summaries of operational, financial and security metrics to senior leadership, or identifying cost-optimization opportunities for our companies.

Key Responsibilities:

• Responsible for the creation, management, administration, support and operations for AWS environments owned by Flagship’s early-stage portfolio companies
• Define standards, processes and procedures around Organizational Units, user access management, backups, BCDR, security configurations & guardrails, monitors and alerts, root cause analysis, tagging policies, change control and budget tracking
• Work closely with partners, stakeholders and internal customers to ensure alignment and consistency
• Identify, prioritize and code operational innovations that increase productivity and create scalable value across the portfolio
• Leverage AWS services such as Lambda, EventBridge, CloudWatch and CloudTrail to build observability, automation and analytics tools
• Author and assemble relevant documentation and training sessions for users, administrators and partners
• Establish standard operational targets, associated metrics and programmatic methods of retrieval across dozens of portfolio companies
• Host regular platform operations reviews, creating business intelligence dashboards to present relevant metrics and updates to business stakeholders, leaders and executives
• Manage and oversee the relationship and activities of MSPs
• Work with finance and leadership for all cloud-related budget planning and ongoing financial management for our companies and locations
• Define a cloud maturity roadmap for startups providing clear guidance on how to increase compliance with industry standard frameworks (e.g. CIS, GDPR, etc) as companies scale

Who you are

You have a track record in both engineering and traditional IT operational leadership – “pull requests” and “pilot lights” are part of the same language. You love to quantify things and are constantly thinking about ways to design processes and measure their value. You're happiest in roles where you can both advise and execute - and know when to choose which path. Coding is a way of life; you deconstruct complex problems into bite-sized solutions that can be combined and reused in novel ways. An addiction to learning allows you keep up with new tools and techniques thereby influencing continuous improvement.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years experience coding experience (pref. Python)
• 4+ years experience in IT with a focus on platform operations, including networking, information security, project, people and vendor management and process development
• 3+ years hands-on experience managing a production multi-account AWS environment
• Broad, deep and current knowledge of AWS services, especially as they relate to platform operations, budgets, security and compliance
• Addicted to metrics and ways to present them in order to drive decisions
• Exceptional project management skills
• People and vendor management experience
• A rational, risk-based philosophy to SecOps with a deep familiarity with compliance frameworks
• A people person with an exceptional ability to engage with stakeholders from end user to executive level
• A well-turned Spidey-sense to understand how to best balance flexibility with standardization in each situation