Senior Director, Cloud Product and Platform Strategy

The Senior Director of Cloud Product and Platform Strategy is a visionary leader responsible for shaping and advancing a portfolio of AI-enabled, cloud-native products. This role sits at the intersection of product innovation, architectural foresight, and platform scalability. The ideal candidate will lead the strategy and discovery process for new product initiatives—delivering working prototypes, comprehensive documentation, and architectural recommendations that enable seamless transition to engineering teams for build-out.

This leader will serve as the glue between cloud product managers, enterprise architects, AI/ML innovation teams, and platform engineering—ensuring that all cloud-native products are aligned with business goals, technically sound, and production-ready.

Product & Platform Strategy
• Define and evolve the strategy for a portfolio of AI-enabled products built on modern cloud-native architecture (e.g., microservices, containers, serverless, event-driven).
• Identify emerging customer needs, tech trends, and industry opportunities to shape long-term platform product vision.
• Drive multi-year product roadmaps across cloud domains including data, identity, integration, and AI acceleration.
• Define success metrics to measure adoption, improvement in efficiency, and business outcomes/ROI.
• Incorporate cost optimization and sustainability into product design, aligning with enterprise strategy.
• Establish portfolio value realization reporting, tracking operational efficiency and customer engagement pipelines.

Product Readiness & Prototyping
• Lead the end-to-end product readiness process: from concept through clickable prototypes, proofs-of-concept, and functional product models.
• Collaborate with design, architecture, and AI engineering teams to bring concepts to life with working demonstrations and clear documentation.
• Translate abstract ideas into tangible platform services or product capabilities that can be engineered and scaled.

Architecture & Documentation
• Define architectural standards and interface requirements for AI-enabled applications leveraging cloud services (e.g., Azure, AWS, or GCP).               • Produce detailed technical specifications, architecture diagrams, and deployment considerations for each product candidate.
• Ensure architecture proposals align with enterprise governance, security, and platform strategy.

Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Partner with engineering leads, architects, data scientists, and security to ensure AI/ML product designs are viable, secure, and performant.
• Act as a product steward in agile delivery, supporting sprint planning and backlog development during transition to engineering.
• Align product efforts with broader enterprise cloud modernization initiatives, MLOps, and platform investments.

Leadership & Portfolio Governance
• Lead and mentor a high-performing team of cloud product owners and platform strategists.
• Establish portfolio governance for new product intake, prioritization, funding, and technical feasibility assessments.
• Report on portfolio health, product maturity, technical risk, and platform readiness to executive stakeholders.

Qualifications:
• 10+ years in product strategy, cloud platform architecture, or enterprise application development.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native design patterns, distributed systems, and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, serverless, microservices).
• Experience designing or managing AI/ML-powered products, with exposure to model deployment, inference pipelines, and MLOps.
• Proven ability to deliver technical documentation, architectural frameworks, and business-aligned roadmaps.
• Strong leadership, stakeholder management, and communication skills—comfortable working with both executives and engineers.
• Relevant cloud and product management/product marketing certifications
• Experience building organizational capability in cloud engineering, data science, AI and product innovation( an expanded version of skill#3)

Skills & Competencies:
• Experience with Azure-native services, Google Cloud AI/Vertex, or AWS SageMaker.
• Familiarity with modern data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, Azure Synapse).
• Prior leadership in product-led transformation or cloud modernization efforts.                                                                                                                     • Experience with tools such as Figma, Mermaid, Lucidchart, or Architecture Decision Records (ADR).

Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Product Management, or related field is Required

Additional Requirements: Full-time, hybrid position.

Benefits & Perks:

401K with Company Match, Profit Sharing, Health Insurance, Employee Assistance Program, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, Tuition Reimbursement, 30% Employee Discount, Employee Referral Bonuses.

UniFirst is an international leader in garment & Uniform services industry. We currently employ over 14,000 team partners who serve 300,000 business customer locations throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

We were included in the top 10 of Selling Power magazine’s “Best Companies to Sell For” list and recognized on Forbes magazine’s “Platinum 400 – Best Big Companies” list. As an 80-year old company focused on annual growth, there’s never been a better time to join our team. 

UniFirst is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or employment against any individual on the basis of race, color, gender, national origin, ancestry, religion, physical or mental disability, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, pregnancy, citizenship, or any other factor protected by anti-discrimination laws

UniFirst is an equal employment employer. If you need accommodation for any part of the application process because of a medical condition or disability, please send an e-mail to TalentAcquisition@unifirst.com or call to let us know the nature of your request.

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