Director, Software Engineering

Role

The role bridges infrastructure and product engineering: you'll build genuine partnerships across product, AI, and enterprise teams so that ownership is shared and velocity is never blocked by platform constraints.

The Director will set a forward-looking cloud vision, proactively align with stakeholders across the business, and ensure the platform scales for multi-shard, multi-region growth while meeting security and compliance commitments (SOC 2, business continuity/disaster recovery, and enterprise security frameworks).

Qualifications

• Deep AWS infrastructure mastery: EKS, networking (VPC/TGW/DNS), and Terraform at scale, with strong architectural judgment and a track record of setting technical direction.
• Strategic roadmap ownership: Track record setting 6–12 month cloud roadmaps tied to business outcomes across enterprise, AI, and cost.
• Cross-team influence: Builds genuine partnerships across Product, Security, SRE, and DB orgs, driving shared ownership across traditional infra/product boundaries.
• Application-level curiosity: Genuinely understands what the product does, not just the infrastructure underneath, and extends ownership past traditional platform boundaries.
• People leadership at scale: Proven experience growing and retaining senior-heavy, geographically distributed teams across FTE/contractor blends; builds bench depth and succession plans.
• Operational rigor: Strong on-call instincts, incident ownership, and RCA follow-through.
• Security-first instincts: This team touches blast radius (auth enforcement, network isolation, shard boundaries). A verify-first, never-assume mindset is non-negotiable.
• AI & automation mindset: Demonstrated appetite for DevSecOps agents, AI-assisted IaC migrations, and skills-based automation — a core part of the near-term roadmap.
• AI/ML infrastructure experience (strong plus): Scaling workloads like GPU orchestration, model-serving infrastructure, or cost-optimized compute for inference.

Education & Experience

• BS/MS in CS, Engineering, or equivalent.
• 10+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering, with significant time in a director-level role managing distributed teams.

Benefits

• Cost Efficiency: Drive significant annual infrastructure savings by migrating data workloads to EKS and self-hosting key services such as OpenSearch.
• Ingress Convergence: Deprecate legacy frontend ALBs and consolidate to a single EKS-managed ALB per shard, unblocking faster deployments across the org.
• Coverage & Bench Depth: Eliminate single points of ownership across Networking, OpenSearch, and Terraform through cross-training and targeted hiring into coverage gaps.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Stand up a recurring alignment cadence with Product, AI, Enterprise, and Security so infra planning is driven by demand, not ad-hoc interrupts.
• Automation: Ship automated shard buildout via Backstage to remove manual toil from enterprise scaling.
• Reliability: Cut P0/P1 incidents attributed to Cloud Platform (DNS, ALB misconfiguration) through hardened ingress patterns and Terraform-policy guardrails, including blocking unauthenticated public endpoints.
• Roadmap Ownership: Deliver a roadmap covering Agent enablement, centralized IaC, and deployment rollout acceleration, tied to AI and Enterprise revenue goals.
• People Leadership: Grow, develop, and retain a senior-heavy team distributed across the US, Canada, and Europe, spanning FTEs and contractors, with a focus on succession planning and bench depth.
• Vendor Management: Own multi-million-dollar AWS spend accountability and contractor oversight, with a savings-pipeline mindset baked into planning.

Pay

$300K - $350K

Schedule

N/A

Skills

• Deep AWS infrastructure mastery: EKS, networking (VPC/TGW/DNS), and Terraform at scale.
• Strategic roadmap ownership: Setting 6–12 month cloud roadmaps tied to business outcomes across enterprise, AI, and cost.
• Cross-team influence: Building genuine partnerships across Product, Security, SRE, and DB orgs.
• Application-level curiosity: Understanding the product beyond just the infrastructure underneath.
• People leadership at scale: Growing and retaining senior-heavy, geographically distributed teams.
• Operational rigor: Strong on-call instincts, incident ownership, and RCA follow-through.
• Security-first instincts: Ensuring blast radius (auth enforcement, network isolation, shard boundaries).
• AI & automation mindset: Appetite for DevSecOps agents, AI-assisted IaC migrations, and skills-based automation.
• AI/ML infrastructure experience: Scaling workloads like GPU orchestration, model-serving infrastructure, or cost-optimized compute for inference.