VP Platform Engineering

About The Role

Volta builds and operates large-scale GPU compute infrastructure for frontier AI customers. The software that turns racks of GPUs into a usable platform is its own product, and it is the one you will own. As VP Platform Engineering, you build and run the organization behind Volta’s internal software stacks. Today that means the IaaS platform we are building and the software that provisions and manages the bare metal beneath it; over time the surface area grows toward the higher-level services that sit on top of an AI factory. You set the strategic direction for all of it under high-level guidance from the CTO, and you build the organization that delivers it. You report to the CTO, sit alongside Volta’s other functional leaders, and lead a distributed organization with a Director, Platform Engineering, EMEA acting as your deputy in Europe.

What You Will Be Doing

• Own the strategy for Volta’s platform software - the IaaS and bare-metal management stacks, the operational and analytics tooling on the data center layer, and the build-versus-buy calls as the business scales.
• Translate the product roadmap owned by the CPO into a concrete platform engineering roadmap, in strategic alignment with the CTO, and own execution against it.
• Make the architectural calls that keep the platform coherent as scope and headcount grow.
• Grow the platform engineering organization from its current size toward 50-plus engineers across the US and EU, deliberately and without lowering the hiring bar.
• Build the management and technical-lead layer beneath you, including hiring the Director, Platform Engineering, EMEA as your deputy.
• Define team structure, ownership boundaries and the engineering practices that keep a fast-growing, distributed organization shipping.
• Lead architecture and design reviews, drive the hard technical debates, and own the boundary between the platform software and the hardware layers beneath it.
• Partner with the CPO and product organization on platform direction, without that partnership running through a reporting line.
• Keep tight, well-defined boundaries with Infrastructure Engineering, Network Engineering and the CDO’s organization, and embed security with Cyber Security Engineering across the SDLC.
• Represent the platform in front of customers and at the executive level inside and outside Volta.

What You Bring

• A track record of building and scaling a software engineering organization at VP or equivalent level, from a small team toward 50-plus people, including org design, hiring, and a layer of managers and leads reporting into you.
• Executive engineering leadership where you set direction and own outcomes across a function, not pure people-management - and you are still credible in a design review.
• A clear, demonstrable understanding of what sits under the hood of a cloud service: virtualization, storage, networking, multi-tenancy and the bare-metal layer beneath them.
• Solid working knowledge of the hardware involved, enough to keep the layers coherent and to reason about where software meets the GPU, fabric and storage reality.
• Experience owning and evolving existing production systems, not only greenfield builds.
• The maturity to take high-level direction and turn it into strategy and execution without needing the details handed to you.
• The judgment to work across organizational boundaries with peer engineering and infrastructure leaders, defining clean seams rather than fighting over them.
• Comfort with full-time on-site presence in our Palo Alto office and travel as needed across a US and EU distributed organization.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience with an IaaS or cloud platform, whether built or operated at scale.
• Familiarity with technologies in our current stack: KVM/QEMU virtualization, Ceph and SPDK storage, BGP/VXLAN networking, Kubernetes operators, PXE/Flatcar provisioning, and languages such as Go, Python and Rust.
• Experience integrating or levelling up an inherited or acquired engineering team.
• Experience where software and physical infrastructure teams had to stay tightly aligned.
• Exposure to building higher-level services on top of an infrastructure platform.