Director, Technical Products and Operations

About this role

At Real Chemistry, making the world a healthier place isn’t just an aspiration—it’s our everyday reality. Our drive to transform healthcare is informed by our blend of deep scientific expertise, human-centred creativity, and AI-driven insights, fostering a unique environment where innovation thrives and our people are impact-obsessed. As a global agency, we provide a full suite of services across healthcare communications and marketing to our clients, including top players in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

Our #LifeatRealChem culture is rooted in our people—we believe we are best together and are committed to excellence for both our clients and colleagues. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your career, if you share our passion for healthcare and connection, we invite you to explore our opportunities.

Discover your purpose. Embrace innovation. Experience #LifeatRealChem.

Director, Technical Product Operations

Role Summary

Real Chemistry is seeking a hands-on Director, Technical Product Operations to own the end-to-end management, operation, and security of our flagship client-facing SaaS products. These platforms are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivered to clients as a commercial product, engineered to be SOC 2 compliant, and increasingly powered by AI-enabled features.

This is a working leadership role — not a purely strategic one. The successful candidate is a technically credible, roll-up-your-sleeves operator who has personally implemented and run a product on AWS infrastructure, and who can lead a team while remaining directly engaged in architecture, deployment, security, and production support. You will be the single point of accountability for platform availability, performance, security posture, and the fully-supported client experience.

What you'll do:

Platform Ownership & AWS Operations

• Own the full lifecycle of the client-facing SaaS products hosted on AWS — from infrastructure design and deployment through ongoing operation, optimization, and support.

• Architect, implement, and maintain scalable, resilient AWS environments (compute, storage, networking, databases, backups) with clear separation across development, staging, and production.

• Lead high-availability and disaster-recovery (HA/DR) design, including backup, failover, and recovery procedures, to meet client and contractual uptime commitments.

• Manage infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and controlled promotion paths between environments.

• Own observability — metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting — and drive continuous improvement of platform performance and cost efficiency (FinOps).

Security, Compliance & SOC 2

• Maintain and continuously mature the platform's security posture, ensuring controls are designed, implemented, evidenced, and audit-ready.

• Own SOC 2 compliance for the platform — partnering with Information Security and external auditors to sustain Type I and progress toward Type II attestation.

• Enforce least-privilege identity and access management (AWS IAM), encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, and tamper-evident audit logging.

• Coordinate third-party penetration testing, vulnerability management, and remediation within defined risk timelines.

• Ensure client-facing security, data-handling, and confidentiality requirements are met and clearly documented for client assurance.

AI-Enabled Product Features

• Support the secure integration and operation of AI/ML and LLM-enabled features within the product, including approved AI providers, usage boundaries, and cost guardrails.

• Partner with engineering and data teams to productionize AI capabilities with appropriate data classification, DLP, and human-in-the-loop controls where required.

Support, Reliability & Client Experience

• Ensure the product is fully supported — establishing SLAs, incident response playbooks, on-call coverage, and runbooks for production systems.

• Serve as senior escalation point for platform incidents, driving rapid resolution and transparent client communication.

• Own change management, release governance, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve reliability.

Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Lead, and mentor the external IT / platform engineering team, setting technical standards and delivery discipline.

• Partner closely with Information Security, Product, and Client-facing teams to align platform capabilities with commercial and client needs.

• Communicate platform health, risk, and roadmap clearly to both technical teams and executive / C-suite stakeholders.

• Manage relationships with key vendors and third parties (AWS and supporting services).

Required Qualifications

• Hands-on track record — the candidate must be a practitioner who has personally implemented and operated a product on AWS infrastructure, not solely a manager of others who do.

• Demonstrated experience implementing a product on AWS (compute, networking, databases, IAM, IaC) from build through production operation.

• 7+ years in IT / platform engineering / cloud operations, including 3+ years operating production workloads in AWS.

• Prior leadership or people-management experience, ideally leading external IT, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering functions.

• Strong working knowledge of SOC 2 (and adjacent frameworks) and the practical implementation of the underlying controls.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud security best practices (least-privilege IAM, secrets management, logging/audit).

• Proven ownership of production reliability — SLAs, incident response, on-call, and HA/DR.

• Excellent communication skills — equally comfortable with hands-on technical teams and C-suite stakeholders.

What you should have:

• Experience delivering a client-facing / commercial SaaS product (multi-tenant, externally sold).

• Experience productionizing AI / LLM-enabled…