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Infrastructure leaders who keep the platform up and the bill down.
TekRecruiter runs Head of Infrastructure and Cloud executive search for tech and SaaS companies, focused solely on technology and engineering leadership. We walk through the systems a candidate ran in production, the outages they led and the cloud spend they owned, so you hire a leader who meets your SLOs without slowing product teams down. Beyond experience, we look for HEARTThe HEART standardHHigh agencyEExecutionAAccountabilityRResourcefulnessTTransparencyWhat we look for, beyond skills →.
Trusted by teams at
What companies hire an infrastructure leader to do.
Own reliability
Service level objectives, error budgets, on-call and incident response, with the observability to catch problems before customers do.
Build the internal platform
Paved roads for deployment, environments and infrastructure as code, so product teams ship without filing a ticket.
Control cloud cost
Tagging, ownership and architecture choices that keep the AWS, Google Cloud or Azure bill growing slower than revenue.
Lead migrations and scale
Cloud migrations, multi-region, Kubernetes, and GPU capacity for AI workloads.
Why infrastructure leadership searches go wrong.
Infrastructure leaders are judged in production, which is exactly where a résumé cannot show you anything.
- 01
Tools, not ownership.
Every résumé lists Kubernetes and Terraform. Few candidates have owned an SLO and answered for missing it.
- 02
A platform nobody adopted.
The last leader built internal tooling that product engineers worked around.
- 03
A cloud bill with no owner.
Spend grew faster than revenue, and the new leader treated cost as finance’s problem.
- 04
A migration that stalled.
Half the workloads moved, the other half still on the old platform, and two systems to run.
We ask what they ran and what happened when it broke.
An infrastructure leader executes the CTO’s vision on the layer everything else depends on. So we walk through the scale they ran, the incidents they led and the trade-offs between reliability, speed and cost, tied to what the business needed at the time. No infrastructure leader reaches your slate without meeting our HEART standard.
- Scale and uptime: the traffic, the SLOs, how close they came to them, and who they answered to when they missed.
- An outage they led: how they found it, how they communicated it, and what changed in the postmortem.
- Platform adoption: whether product engineers chose what their team built, and how they know.
- Cost ownership: how they measured and cut cloud spend, and what it did to delivery speed.
| A generalist executive search firm | TekRecruiter |
|---|---|
| Screens on tool keywords | Walks through what they ran in production |
| Counts certifications | Asks about SLOs, incidents and the cloud bill |
| One cloud looks like another | AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft partner |
| A recruiter who reads the stack aloud | A founder certified as a cloud architect on all three |
| Hires the leader, not the team | Also recruits the DevOps and SRE engineers under them |
The HEART standard
What we look for beyond skills and experience, in every candidate we present.
- High agencyPeople who see what needs to be done and act without waiting to be told.
- ExecutionPeople who turn ideas into results.
- AccountabilityPeople who own the outcome, not just their piece of the work.
- ResourcefulnessPeople who figure things out when the answer isn’t obvious.
- TransparencyPeople who communicate clearly, honestly, and early.
When an infrastructure leadership search is the right call.
- SaaS companies whose uptime or cloud bill has become a board-level topic.
- Growing platforms that need a platform team and its leader, not only more DevOps engineers.
- Companies mid-migration to AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, or between them.
- IT operations and help desk leadership. We search for leaders of product infrastructure.
- Data center facilities roles. We search for cloud and platform leaders, not facilities managers.
- Searches judged on certifications alone. We assess what the leader ran in production.
From the vision to the start date.
Define the mandate
Where the business is now, where this leader must take it in the first year, the team and systems they inherit, and the budget they will work within.
Map and approach
We approach leaders directly, most of whom are not looking, with an anonymized brief that makes the role clear without naming the company.
Assess, present, close
Deep conversations and references on every finalist, then compensation, equity, counteroffers and relocation handled through the start date.
What clients say.
A former colleague referred me to TekRecruiter, and I was very impressed by the caliber of the senior DevOps engineers they presented. I identified two senior DevOps engineers who were exceptional fits for my team.
Their ability to quickly supply highly skilled software and DevOps engineers who blend in well with our existing teams continues to amaze me. They are highly technical at the account management level and transparently propose different solutions, whether staff augmentation or nearshore outsourcing.
The hiring team needed someone who could build a Java automation framework from scratch, and we had worked the search for six straight months with at least 12 or 13 vendors. TekRecruiter sent one candidate, and he got the job.
We needed to hire a senior IAM engineer with deep SOC 2 knowledge, and the role had been open for more than three months. Within a week of speaking with Ron, his team sent over three very solid profiles, and we finally found the right fit in just two weeks.
Across multiple companies, I’ve hired more than six senior software engineers through TekRecruiter, and every one of them has been an impressive builder.
I got a firsthand look when I needed a software engineer with strong TypeScript skills to join my team. I was happy with the candidates, and I was able to make a hiring decision.
He said he would share three to four candidates within a week, and that’s exactly what he did. We hired a senior software engineer we’re confident in, and we’ve been thrilled with how well things have worked out.
The few times I’ve hired over the last five years, I’ve always been vendor neutral, and TekRecruiter has been the staffing partner that filled every one of those open engineering roles.
Infrastructure leadership questions, answered.
What does a Head of Infrastructure do?
A Head of Infrastructure owns the systems the product runs on: cloud architecture, reliability and on-call, infrastructure as code, security of the platform, and cloud cost. At many companies the role also leads platform engineering and SRE.
What is the difference between platform engineering, SRE and DevOps leadership?
Platform engineering builds internal tools and paved roads that product teams use to ship. SRE owns reliability with measurable targets and incident response. DevOps describes the practices that connect the two. One leader often owns all three; larger companies split them.
When do we need an infrastructure leader rather than more DevOps engineers?
When problems are about direction rather than capacity: repeated outages, cloud spend growing faster than revenue, a migration without an owner, or product teams waiting on infrastructure. For hands-on hiring, see DevOps, SRE & Cloud Infrastructure.
Who should own cloud cost?
The infrastructure leader should own the practice, and every product team should own its share of the bill. That usually means tagging every resource to a team, showing each team its spend, and making cost a design input alongside reliability, the approach the FinOps Foundation calls FinOps.
Should the Head of Infrastructure report to the CTO or the VP of Engineering?
At most startups, to the CTO, because infrastructure decisions shape the whole platform. In larger organizations it often sits under the VP of Engineering beside the product teams it serves. Decide before the search, because it changes the seniority of the leaders who will take the role.
Is the search retained or contingent?
Both. There is no one-size-fits-all approach: many of our executive searches are retained and some are contingent, depending on the client, the role and the market. We recommend a model before the search starts.
How long does a leadership search take?
From first outreach to the leader’s start date, our leadership searches average about six months. That includes the search, interviews, compensation negotiation and the notice period at the leader’s current company.
Can the search stay confidential?
Yes. We sign NDAs, describe the role in detail but anonymize the company in first conversations, and share company details only with candidates we know we will present. Replacements for sitting leaders are never posted.
What is the HEART standard?
HEART is the standard we screen every candidate against, beyond skills: high agency, execution, accountability, resourcefulness and transparency. It describes people who take ownership, turn ideas into results and move the business forward. See the standard.
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