About the Role
We're looking for a Director of Infrastructure, Security & IT Operations to own and scale the infrastructure, security, and IT operations that power Clutch's platform. Clutch is a vertical SaaS company (backed by A16z) that provides white-label lending and account opening software to credit unions across the US. Our platform serves 163 credit unions, processes sensitive financial data, and must meet strict compliance requirements (SOC 2 Type II, GLBA, CCPA).
This role is the single owner of our cloud infrastructure (AWS), security posture, compliance programs, IT operations, and vendor management. You'll report directly to the VP of Engineering and work closely with the CEO, COO, and Legal on strategy. This is a leadership role where you'll define the direction, build the team, and execute with high autonomy.
About the Team
You'll lead a team spanning Infrastructure, Security, and IT. Today the team includes an Infrastructure engineering manager (Lucas Sousa) and his engineers, Security individual contributors, and a small IT support team. The broader engineering org is about 80 people across Brazil and the US, organized into five areas: Lending, Foundations, Security and IT, Account Opening, and cross-functional teams (HAL AI, Data). You'll work cross-functionally with every engineering team (they all depend on your infrastructure and security posture), plus Finance (vendor budgets), Legal (compliance), and Customer Success (implementation environments). The culture is direct, accountable, and moves fast. We operate on a "You Build It, You Run It" principle and value completed staff work over escalation.
What You'll Do
Within 3 months, you will:
Complete a full audit of infrastructure, security posture, vendor accounts, and IT operations. Identify gaps and quick wins
Take ownership of all vendor relationships and complete account transfers from the previous director
Establish your working relationship with every engineering team, Finance, Legal, and Customer Success
Assess and strengthen incident response protocols and cybersecurity monitoring (Datadog SIEM, Cloudflare)
Evaluate and stabilize IT operations, including support SLAs and the endpoint management program
Within 6 months, you will:
Drive vendor rationalization. We have 30+ tools identified for review ($229K in immediate cuts, $1.2M under evaluation). Own the decision-making and execution
Implement improvements to our compliance program (SOC 2 Type II, GLBA) and own the next audit cycle
Optimize cloud infrastructure costs and performance across our AWS organization (multiple accounts, ECS Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL)
Improve sandbox and environment management for customer implementations. Credit unions need secure, reliable sandbox environments for onboarding
Define and begin executing on the team structure and hiring plan for your org
Within 9 months, you will:
Have a fully staffed and operating Infrastructure, Security & IT Operations org with clear ownership boundaries
Advance cloud security and data protection strategies, including improvements to per-partner data …
