VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering

JOIN THE BEST TEAM IN SPORT & SPIRIT

At Varsity Brands, we believe every student deserves the opportunity to succeed and every educator wants to make a difference. It takes a team to make a real impact, and through our two divisions – BSN SPORTS and Varsity Spirit – and our network of 6,000+ employees and independent representatives, we are proud to partner with a wide range of educational institutions and club and professional sports to transform the student journey in SPORT and SPIRIT.

Location: Onsite 4 days per week at Varsity Brands HQ in Farmers Branch, TX

HOW YOU WILL MAKE AN IMPACT:

Varsity Brands is seeking a transformational technology leader to lead the modernization of the company's Cloud Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Network Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Enterprise Infrastructure Operations.

Reporting to the Chief Technology & Product Officer, the VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering will define and execute the enterprise infrastructure strategy while ensuring the reliability, security, scalability, and operational excellence of mission-critical technology platforms.

The VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering will lead Varsity Brands' multi-year transformation from traditional on-premises infrastructure to a modern AWS-based cloud platform while maintaining highly available enterprise systems throughout the transition. This role is accountable for building an automation-first engineering organization that enables product teams to deliver technology faster, improves customer experience, and supports the company's long-term digital growth.

Success in this role requires a professional who combines deep technical expertise with exceptional leadership, business partnership, and execution capabilities. The ideal candidate demonstrates a customer-first mindset, operates with urgency, proactively leads through ambiguity, builds trusted partnerships across Engineering, Product, Security, Data, AI, Enterprise Applications, and business functions, while ensuring infrastructure strategy aligns with business priorities and customer outcomes. This leader creates clarity where others see uncertainty, removes barriers to execution, and fosters a culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Why This Role Matters

Varsity Brands is modernizing its technology platform to better serve customers, accelerate product delivery, strengthen enterprise reliability, and enable future growth. Cloud infrastructure has become a strategic business capability rather than simply an operational function.

The VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering will build the secure, scalable, and highly available technology foundation that enables Engineering, Product, Data, AI, Security, and business teams to innovate with confidence. This leader will also help establish the operating model, cross-functional partnerships, and execution discipline required to translate infrastructure modernization into faster delivery, stronger reliability, and better customer outcomes.

This role matters because it connects enterprise infrastructure strategy directly to business performance, customer experience, and the company’s long-term transformation agenda.

WHAT YOU WILL DO:

Cloud Transformation Leadership

Define and execute the multi-year cloud migration roadmap

Lead migration of application workloads from on-premises infrastructure to AWS

Design enterprise landing zones, networking, IAM, security, governance, and shared platform services

Establish cloud architecture standards and engineering best practices

Drive modernization through containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and platform engineering

Lead the organizational change required to successfully execute the cloud transformation by aligning stakeholders, proactively removing barriers, driving adoption of modern engineering practices, making timely decisions, and maintaining momentum across the enterprise

Data Center Operations

Maintain enterprise-class operations for remaining on-premises systems including:

SAP ECC

Nutanix or VMware

Windows/Linux infrastructure

Enterprise storage

Backup & recovery

Disaster Recovery

Networking

Firewalls

Active Directory

Monitoring

Data center capacity planning

Maintain 24x7 operational excellence throughout the migration journey.

AWS Platform Engineering

Own enterprise AWS services including:

Landing Zones

Organizations

VPC Architecture

IAM

EKS

ECS

EC2

RDS

Aurora

S3

Lambda

CloudFront

Route53

Bedrock

CloudWatch

Systems Manager

Security Hub

GuardDuty

AWS Backup

Infrastructure Automation

Build an Infrastructure-as-Code culture using:

Terraform

CloudFormation

GitHub Actions

CI/CD

Automated environment provisioning

Automated patching

Policy as Code

Configuration Management

Self-service platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to provision infrastructure consistently, securely, and with minimal manual intervention

Reliability Engineering

Build modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) capabilities:

Observability

Incident Management

Availability Engineering

Capacity Planning

Performance Engineering

Error Budgets

Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity

Partner with Engineering, Product, Security, and IT Operations leaders to embed reliability, operational readiness, and customer impact into the software delivery lifecycle

Security & Compliance

Partner with Security leadership to ensure:

Zero Trust Architecture

IAM governance

Encryption

Vulnerability Management

Cloud Security

Network Security

PCI/SOX compliance

Disaster Recovery testing

Financial Management

Own infrastructure financial performance including:

Cloud cost optimization (FinOps)

Data center cost optimization

Vendor management

Capacity forecasting

Budget planning

AWS Reserved Instances

Savings Plans

License optimization

Balance cost optimization with platform reliability, scalability, security, and long-term business value

Organizational Leadership

Lead teams across:

Cloud Engineering

Infrastructure Engineering

Network Engineering

Platform Engineering

DevOps

Site Reliability Engineering

Data Center Operations

Build a culture focused on automation, reliability, operational excellence, and customer-first execution, where leaders demonstrate ownership, move with urgency, build trusted partnerships across teams, proactively resolve ambiguity, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and consistently deliver measurable business outcomes.

Enterprise Operational Leadership

In addition to leading day-to-day Cloud Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Infrastructure Operations, the VP, Infrastructure & Cloud Engineering will establish the enterprise operating standards, governance, and engineering discipline that enable Varsity Brands' technology platforms to operate with reliability, security, scalability, and operational excellence.

Define enterprise standards that guide infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, automation, and operational excellence across the technology organization

Establish governance that aligns technology investments with business priorities

Create executive visibility through infrastructure performance metrics, operational reporting, and business-focused dashboards

Build strong partnerships across Engineering, Product, Security, Data, AI, Enterprise Applications, and business functions

Remove organizational barriers that slow delivery and improve cross-functional collaboration

Lead through ambiguity by proactively identifying decisions, resolving dependencies, and driving execution

Foster a culture of urgency, ownership, customer focus, and continuous improvement

Build operating rhythms that create transparency, accelerate decision-making, improve cros