Director Cloud Engineering (Hybrid)

Company Description

Colliers is a leading diversified professional services and investment management company. With operations in 68 countries, our 22,000 enterprising people work collaboratively to provide expert advice to maximize the potential of property and real assets to accelerate the success of our clients, our investors and our people.

We are at the forefront of the real estate industry, leading the way and backed by an exceptional record of success. We are building for our future – and yours.

We strive to build our business at a competitive pace by augmenting internal growth with smart strategic acquisitions that increase market share, expand service offerings and extend our geographic reach for the benefit of our clients and shareholders.

For more than 29 years, Colliers has created value for shareholders that has resulted in superior returns and industry growth. Our people also own significant equity in our business, which brings pride of ownership to everything we do. We are passionate, take personal responsibility and always do what's right for our clients, people and communities.

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced and passionate Director of Cloud Engineering for our Technology Hub in Madrid. This is a unique opportunity to become part of the exceptional team that helps shape the culture, practices, and technical direction. Working in a hybrid model, you will enjoy significant freedom to innovate and influence the future of one of the world’s largest commercial real estate companies. With the leadership of the Global Technology Hub coming from a background of technology startups, you will benefit from a fast-paced learning environment, high visibility of your contributions and opportunities to shape processes, culture and technology strategies. At the same time, you take advantage of the stability, resources, and reach of a successful global company.

The Director of Cloud Engineering will provide leadership and technical expertise to establish and scale a world-class Cloud Engineering function at Colliers, with a primary focus on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This role will be responsible for defining the cloud strategy, building robust engineering practices, and ensuring secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud operations across the enterprise.

Working closely with the Director of Software Engineering, DevOps leadership, and other technology stakeholders, this position will drive innovation, automation, and operational excellence in cloud adoption and management. The successful candidate will combine deep technical knowledge with strong leadership skills to influence architecture decisions, optimize cloud performance, and enable business agility.

Strategy & Governance

• Design & continually improve organizational design for the cloud engineering function (team structure, operating model)
• Establish and govern the cloud strategy, standards, and architectural guardrails for GCP.
• Work with Enterprise Architecture to enforce and adopt cloud reference architectures, patterns, and design.
• Establish policy-as-code frameworks, defining multi-cloud consistency principles, and articulating a clear cloud security vision.
• Define and govern cloud tooling strategy in alignment and partnership with DevOps.
• Drive cloud-first, automation-first, approaches across engineering and infrastructure
• Oversee compliance alignment, platform risk management, and audit readiness
• Maintain visibility of emerging technologies and assess applicability
• Define measurable KPIs/OKRs for reliability, cost optimization, and deployment speed

Leadership and Capability Development

• Lead a global team of cloud managers, engineers, and other specialists
• Define skill development paths, hiring needs, and capability roadmaps
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, documentation, and automation
• Coaching engineers and technical leaders on modern cloud and platform patterns; fostering a culture of continuous improvement and proactive risk mitigation; ingraining agile practices and rituals.
• Promote cross-team collaboration and shared ownership
• Promote diversity, inclusion, and succession planning within the team.

Financial and Vendor Management

• Own cloud financial management, cost optimization strategies.
• Partner with Finance and product owners for budget planning and cost transparency.
• Manage relationships with cloud providers and manage enterprise agreements.

Delivery Quality and Operation Excellence

• Oversee the design, implementation, and optimization of cloud infrastructure across GCP and Azure.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture to guide and finalize cloud architectural decisions.
• Align with Information Security to uphold and evolve security policies, configurations, and compliance.
• Own and commit to defining and achieving Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Objectives (SLOs).
• Develop and maintain operational playbooks, runbooks, and comprehensive service readiness programs.
• Oversee IaC standards, CI/CD integrations, and cloud infrastructure testing frameworks.
• Drive integrated observability of cloud infrastructure, aligning with engineering, data, and InfoSec.
• Implement SRE principles to proactively enhance system reliability, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Architect and maintain resilient, scalable, and cost-efficient multi-cloud production and development environments.
• Lead incident response, foster a blameless postmortem culture, and drive continuous improvement.
• Define and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity strategies to ensure service resilience.​​​​​​​

Stakeholder and Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with the Director of Software Engineering, DevOps teams, and other technology leaders to enable seamless integration between cloud platforms and application development.
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on cloud trends, emerging technologies, and strategic opportunities.
• Work closely with Information Security to enhance and maintain a strong, proactive threat posture.
• Partner with product, engineering, and data teams to ensure cloud capabilities are optimized for current and future needs, facilitating successful release management
• Represent Cloud Engineering in engineering forums and steering groups.

Qualifications

Required Skills/Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (Master’s degree preferred).
• 10+ years of experience in cloud engineering or infrastructure leadership roles, with at least 5 years in a senior management capacity.
• Proven expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure, including architecture, operations, and security.
• Strong understanding of DevOps principles, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.).
• Experience managing large-scale, mission-critical cloud environments in a global organization.
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills. 

Preferred Certifications

• Google Professional Cloud Architect
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• AWS experience (optional but beneficial)
• PMP or equivalent project management certification

Leadership Competencies

• Proven ability to translate high-level strategic vision into executable, result-driven plans.
• Excels at decisive problem-solving and critical decision-making in high-pressure environments.
• Inspirational leaders with a track record of uniting cross-functional teams to achieve shared objectives.
• Demonstrates high cultural intelligence, fostering effective collaboration across diverse global teams.