[Hiring] Director, Production and Infrastructure Engineering @Trase Systems

Role Description

We are seeking an Engineering Leader to build and lead our Production and Infrastructure Engineering organization. You will manage engineers across DevOps, SRE, DevEx, MLOps, and lead a dedicated support team. You will be accountable for team performance, development, and delivery across these functions.

You will bring a strong foundation in infrastructure and software engineering and stay close enough to the work to challenge assumptions, guide technical decisions, and help engineers resolve difficult problems. Your hands-on involvement will focus on design and code reviews, technical investigation, and pairing when needed, while developing technical leads and delegating implementation to the team.

This role calls for a nimble, adaptable leader who can organize ambiguous work, adjust plans as priorities change, and bring different technical disciplines together around clear outcomes. You will create focus, make timely decisions, and build a team that delivers consistently.

Responsibilities

• Build and Develop the Team: Own hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, career development, and performance management. Coach junior engineers, develop technical leads, and give senior specialists clear expectations and candid feedback. Build the skills and ownership needed for the team to operate effectively.
• Lead Across Technical Disciplines: Set shared priorities and clear responsibilities across infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, testing, and application delivery. Delegate technical execution to the appropriate leads, resolve disagreements, and hold engineers at every level accountable to agreed decisions and commitments.
• Own Planning and Delivery: Lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, capacity planning, and delivery reviews in partnership with technical leads and TPMs. Turn ambiguous goals into actionable work, manage dependencies and scope, and balance roadmap delivery with incidents and customer support. Replan quickly and communicate tradeoffs when conditions change.
• Provide Hands-On Technical Leadership: Participate in design and code reviews, ask informed questions, and join investigations or pairing sessions when the team is blocked. Use your infrastructure and software background to connect application behavior with deployment and operational concerns and guide practical solutions.
• Lead Production and Release Readiness: Make reliability, release and change management, QA, and E2E validation part of the team's delivery process. Assign accountable owners, establish readiness criteria with feature teams, and ensure testing, operational documentation, and rollback plans support release decisions.
• Strengthen Operations and Developer Experience: Lead the team's improvements to cloud infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, observability, on-call readiness, and incident response. Prioritize work that reduces recurring incidents and developer friction. Use delivery, reliability, recovery, and support metrics to assess results and guide investment.
• Lead Dedicated Red Cell Partners Support: Manage a cross-functional team of full-stack engineers, DevOps engineers, and a dedicated TPM. Align priorities, staffing, delivery commitments, and support expectations with stakeholders. Resolve dependencies across application and infrastructure teams and maintain clear escalation paths.
• Partner Across the Organization: Work with Product, Platform, Applied AI, and Security/GRC on delivery priorities, operational readiness, and applicable customer requirements. Surface risks early, secure decisions when needed, and ensure follow-through on engineering commitments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant engineering experience, including 5+ years of direct engineering people management, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• A track record of building teams, coaching engineers (platform, infrastructure), managing performance, and delivering through technical leads.
• Director-level candidates should demonstrate leadership across multiple engineering functions.
• Experience leading teams with different technical specialties and seniority levels.
• Strong planning, prioritization, delegation, and stakeholder communication; able to resolve technical disagreements and keep teams aligned to shared outcomes.
• A strong technical foundation in at least one major cloud platform, such as GCP, AWS, or Azure, with practical experience in Kubernetes, containers, networking, identity, and production operations.
• Practical experience with Terraform, Git-based development workflows, GitOps, and CI/CD.
• A strong background building and shipping production software, with working depth across backend services, APIs, data stores, and full-stack integration.
• Experience leading production delivery and support, including reliability, incident response, release and change management, and collaboration with engineers on automated testing and E2E readiness.
• Demonstrated ability to bring structure to ambiguity, learn unfamiliar technical domains, and make timely decisions with incomplete information.
• Experience managing technical commitments and escalations with internal or external customers, and translating their needs into feasible priorities and delivery plans.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with MLOps, model serving, or operating AI/ML and agent workloads; able to learn from and partner with specialists in these areas.
• Experience supporting customer-managed environments, multiple cloud providers, or enterprise deployments with complex integration needs.
• Experience in national security, federal, regulated, or other security-sensitive environments and partnering with Security/GRC on engineering requirements.
• Experience scaling an engineering organization or building a new team or operating function in a fast-changing company.
• Certain national security assignments may require U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a security clearance, depending on confirmed customer and contract requirements.
• Some travel is required.

Benefits

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows.
• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
• Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
• Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind.