Our Ability Jobs

472612BR

Title:

Director, Cloud Engineering

What you'll do... :

H&R Block, the world’s leader in tax preparation services, is looking for a Director of Technology - Cloud Engineering to lead a global team that will implement and grow the platform systems that bolster our products. These teams empower our product and technical teams to deliver value to the end customer in a fast and reliable approach by focusing on availability, reliability, and scalability.

This position is located at our corporate headquarters, in the premier downtown Power & Light District of Kansas City, where everything is either steps or a streetcar ride away. Join us as we modernize our technology landscape and increase the speed and quality we deliver new products and capabilities to our associates and clients. Are you ready to lead digital transformation and innovation at a well-respected company that is poised to redefine the way financial services are viewed? H&R Block is in the midst of positive cultural and technological change, and this role is pivotal in accelerating and guiding the change.

More than three years into its IT transformation, the journey has included a significant move to cloud computing, particularly Microsoft Azure, along with Agile and DevOps approaches to operate at the ever-increasing speed of technology in the marketplace. The process of migrating to the cloud has involved a combination of developing greenfield cloud-native applications that take advantage of cloud services. Infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines and automated testing are being employed to radically increase speed to market and quality.

With a passion for technology, Cloud and DevOps, this leadership position will play a critical role influencing teams to improve system reliability through site reliability engineering, load and performance testing, and improved observability and monitoring.

Team Leadership: Lead, direct and coach your team to bring strong operational discipline, customer focus, technology expertise and automation to the organization. Your organization includes site reliability engineering, Cloud platform, infrastructure as code automation, server automation, incident management, monitoring as a platform, service management and Cloud FinOps.

Partnership: Collaborate with H&R Block technology and product teams to build agile and DevOps processes into our platforms and products. Using a metrics driven framework to assess progress and determine where to engage – with coaching and leadership.

Change agent: Digital transformation is a meaningful shift for H&R Block, this role needs to drive the change with thought leadership, empathy, and determination to make a difference. Managing relationship, at all levels, to move the organization forward. Creating change management approaches and strategies to move the organization towards the future state to improve the use of DevOps strategies and Cloud technologies.

Strategy and Direction: With your team, create and maintain a vision, strategy, and executable roadmap focused on delivering greater levels of reliability and speed. The IT strategy is grounded in the expectation that we can become a mature Cloud and DevOps shop. This role is pivotal in delivering that.

Purpose: Be a part of H&R Block’s purpose to provide help and inspire confidence in our clients and communities everywhere.

Day to day, you'll...

• Build, lead and mentor the Cloud Infrastructure teams; create an environment of teamwork, trust, transparency, and mutual success

• Develop organizational-level goals, drive the technical and organizational roadmap for your teams while collaborating on the product and business on strategies

• Manage the end-to-end experience which enables our engineering team by leveraging frameworks, tools, APIs, and visualizations to better understand the behavior of features services, and infrastructure they own and maintain

• Help educate partners on how to appropriately monitor services and features for their products, provide visualizations for monitoring distributed systems, give guidance for reducing operational overhead, and support the delivery of high availability to our customers

• Participate in deep technical design discussions within your team, across partner teams, and ensure that we're building the right systems

• Influence leaders and teams to effect positive change across the technology organization.

• Be an evangelist for the Cloud Infrastructure teams and overall culture, both internally and externally

• Build a cost-conscious culture with visibility to IT spend to influence software development and architectural decisions

• Aggressively recruit and hire talented engineers and help them build and execute personal development plans that support our organization goals

• Develop and manage IT budget for Cloud Infrastructure and SaaS products to facilitate Cloud operations

• Proven record of defining technology roadmap, executing defined technology strategies and driving adoption across a large enterprise

• Drive process improvement and adoption of standard process and procedures for operational efficiency

• Evaluate performance and provide coaching for IT personnel. Promote diversity and foster teamwork, collaboration, and a learning organization

• Support the CIO, CISO, and Enterprise Architects by implementing infrastructure solutions that align to the enterprise architecture framework and roadmap

Job ID:

472612BR

Address1:

CSC ONE H&R BLOCK WAY

City:

KANSAS CITY

State:

Missouri

About H&R Block... :

H&R Block’s purpose is simple: To provide help and inspire confidence in our clients and communities everywhere. We’ve been true to that purpose since brothers Henry and Richard Bloch founded our company in 1955. Since then, we’ve grown to have approximately 12,000 offices throughout the United States and around the world.

We are a people company first and a tax company second. People who join H&R Block say it feels like being part of something bigger. A place with an amazing and storied history, but with a strong and urgent focus on the future. Maybe it’s how determined, forward thinking and innovative we are, or how accessible our leadership is. We believe it’s all those things, and much more.

H&R Block is committed to diversity and inclusion and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class. All qualified applicants are welcomed and encouraged to apply.

Employee Type:

Regular

It would be even better if you also had... :

Some mix of H&R Block's cutting-edge technologies –

• Kubernetes-backed microservice applications

• Docker

• Cosmos DB

• Istio Service Mesh

• Redis

• Azure Data Factory

• Azure Data Lake

• Serverless (Azure functions)

• Terraform

• Angular Micro UI

What you'll bring to the team... :

• 10+ years of experience in related technology roles, with at least five years building and architecting software systems. Previous experience delivering Observability at scale is required

• 6+ years of experience as a People Manager, including developing and managing a significant department budget. Global team experience is a plus

• You are an experienced leader, able to guide teams and executives through complex data-driven decisions

• Candidates must possess excellent leadership qualities and communication skills, including the proven abilities to facilitate meetings, manage cross-functional teams, champion ideas and influence others up, down and across the organization to obtain buy-in for the products and/or programs

• Ability to adapt rapidly in a fast-moving environment with shifting priorities and the ability to react quickly, dynamically, and intelligently

• Experience designing, building, and/or running production systems in cloud or migrating to the cloud such as Azure or AWS, practicing infrastructure as code, continuous integration and automated deployment, automated testing, autoscaling, and self-healing

• Solid understanding of new technology stacks and key personas such as SRE/DevOps/ITOps.

• Knowledge of the Observability/APM/AIOps market and key capabilities/differentiation across the categories

• Track record of delivery in a modern software development lifecycle using scalable Agile, including experience with CI/CD frameworks and continuous deployment

• Experience managing teams that designed and operated critical infrastructure, observability, and importantly with a culture that views availability as a software engineering problem

• Proven track record of improving reliability, availability, and performance of complex distributed cloud-based systems

• Experience identifying metrics and using instrumentation to monitor products and systems.

• Strong communication and presentation skills

Posting Title:

Director, Cloud Engineering

Sponsored Job:

#LI-SH1

Job Family:

People Leaders

WOTC Eligibility Check:

Yes