Director, Technical Products and Operations

<div class="content-intro"><p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Discover your purpose. Embrace innovation. Experience #LifeatRealChem.</p></div><p><strong>Director, Technical Product Operations</strong></p> <p>Role Summary</p> <p>Real Chemistry is seeking a hands-on <strong>Director, Technical Product Operations</strong> to own the end-to-end management, operation, and security of our flagship client-facing SaaS products.  These platforms are hosted in <strong>Amazon Web Services (AWS)</strong>, delivered to clients as a commercial product, engineered to be <strong>SOC 2 compliant</strong>, and increasingly powered by <strong>AI-enabled features</strong>.</p> <p>This is a working leadership role — not a purely strategic one. The successful candidate is a <strong>technically credible, roll-up-your-sleeves operator</strong> 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.</p> <p><strong>What you'll do:</strong></p> <p><strong>Platform Ownership & AWS Operations</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own the full lifecycle of the client-facing SaaS products hosted on AWS — from infrastructure design and deployment through ongoing operation, optimization, and support.</li> <li>Architect, implement, and maintain <strong>scalable, resilient AWS environments</strong> (compute, storage, networking, databases, backups) with clear separation across development, staging, and production.</li> <li>Lead <strong>high-availability and disaster-recovery (HA/DR)</strong> design, including backup, failover, and recovery procedures, to meet client and contractual uptime commitments.</li> <li>Manage infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and controlled promotion paths between environments.</li> <li>Own observability — metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting — and drive continuous improvement of platform performance and cost efficiency (FinOps).</li> </ul> <p><strong>Security, Compliance & SOC 2</strong></p> <ul> <li>Maintain and continuously mature the platform's <strong>security posture</strong>, ensuring controls are designed, implemented, evidenced, and audit-ready.</li> <li>Own <strong>SOC 2 compliance</strong> for the platform — partnering with Information Security and external auditors to sustain Type I and progress toward Type II attestation.</li> <li>Enforce least-privilege identity and access management (AWS IAM), encryption in transit and at rest, secrets management, and tamper-evident audit logging.</li> <li>Coordinate third-party penetration testing, vulnerability management, and remediation within defined risk timelines.</li> <li>Ensure client-facing security, data-handling, and confidentiality requirements are met and clearly documented for client assurance.</li> </ul> <p><strong>AI-Enabled Product Features</strong></p> <ul> <li>Support the secure integration and operation of <strong>AI/ML and LLM-enabled features</strong> within the product, including approved AI providers, usage boundaries, and cost guardrails.</li> <li>Partner with engineering and data teams to productionize AI capabilities with appropriate data classification, DLP, and human-in-the-loop controls where required.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Support, Reliability & Client Experience</strong></p> <ul> <li>Ensure the product is <strong>fully supported</strong> — establishing SLAs, incident response playbooks, on-call coverage, and runbooks for production systems.</li> <li>Serve as senior escalation point for platform incidents, driving rapid resolution and transparent client communication.</li> <li>Own change management, release governance, and post-incident reviews to continuously improve reliability.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership</strong></p> <ul> <li>Lead, and mentor the external IT / platform engineering team, setting technical standards and delivery discipline.</li> <li>Partner closely with Information Security, Product, and Client-facing teams to align platform capabilities with commercial and client needs.</li> <li>Communicate platform health, risk, and roadmap clearly to both technical teams and executive / C-suite stakeholders.</li> <li>Manage relationships with key vendors and third parties (AWS and supporting services).</l