Senior Director, Core Infrastructure Engineering

Description

Provides strategic leadership for multiple teams or small group delivering interdependent, hyper-scale distributed systems. Sets direction and governance for architecture, scalability, and performance; sponsors code/system optimization programs for large-scale data processing; and forges partnerships to define customer-aligned scalability requirements. Oversees elastic design patterns and drives collaboration and innovation in data plane platforms. Establishes group-wide strategies for fault-tolerance and in-service updates (redundancy, replication, automatic failover), influences partition-aware design choices, and directs approaches for network unreliability (load-shedding, throttling, rate-limiting). Creates KPI and telemetry strategies and directs complex dashboards and alerting to ensure proactive system health. Ensures functional/correctness requirements align to organizational objectives; institutionalizes formal verification and best practices for replication/synchronization. Develops procedures for cross-org diagnosis and resolution, eliminates customer maintenance windows, enforces operational readiness and SOPs, and provides thought leadership for high-severity incidents and RCAs. Sets security direction for multi-tenant protections (encryption, access controls), drives remediation programs and compliance documentation, and oversees automation (IaC) and contributes to organization-wide change management for safe, automated patching, updates, and rollbacks. Regular communications with executives.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

System Design & Architecture – System Scalability:

• Provides strategic oversight of the department for the architecture and design of interdependent scalable distributed systems, including the use of distributed state management tools, ensuring strategies support organizational and system demands.
• Develops and implements processes for code and/or system optimization initiatives for large-scale data processing and high-throughput requirements, supporting hyper-scale systems and driving innovation that impacts the entire organization.
• Develops strategic partnerships that help identify and define system scalability requirements, ensuring the defined requirements meet customer expectations.
• Oversees the design of interdependent systems to scale with elasticity (e.g., effectively scaling both up and down).
• Drives collaboration and innovation in the use of data plane platforms.

System Design & Architecture – System Reliability Design:

• Provides direction for developing and implementing strategies related to building fault-tolerant interdependent systems capable of withstanding in-service updates, ensuring redundancy, replication, and automatic failover mechanisms are implemented across the organization.
• Influences design at a strategic level for systems to effectively handle service disruptions (e.g., network partitions) by prioritizing consistency, availability, or partition tolerance.
• Leads and optimizes strategic implementation approaches for handling network unreliability, including directing strategies for load-shedding, throttling, and rate-limiting.
• Drives the use of formal verification techniques to verify system designs and conduct peer reviews across the organization.
• Develops strategies for the design of interdependent systems that are durable and adhere to service level objectives (SLOs), driving standards for availability and durability of other computing services across the organization.

System Design & Architecture – System Reliability Performance:

• Creates strategies for defining key performance indicators (KPIs) and telemetry to identify risks, gaps, or cyclical dependencies in running systems, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.
• Directs the creation and customization of complex dashboards, telemetry systems, and alerting mechanisms that proactively monitor and ensure optimal system health across the organization.

System Design & Architecture – Correctness / Availability:

• Ensures that functional and correctness requirements align with organizational objectives, and drives the identification of improvement opportunities across the organization.
• Develops strategically aligned processes for formally verifying complex features to ensure system design correctness.
• Directs and identifies best practices for the implementation of data replication and synchronization techniques, ensuring data integrity and availability across the organization.

Operational Troubleshooting & Incident Management:

• Develops procedural strategies for diagnosing, debugging, and resolving issues in active interdependent systems across the organization, aligning initiatives with organizational objectives for ongoing operations.
• Drives strategies across the organization to prevent interruptions, ensuring no maintenance windows are required for customers and users when resolving issues.
• Drives alignment and holds teams accountable across the organization for following operational readiness protocol and standard operating procedures.
• Provides thought leadership to the department for highly complex incident response and root cause investigations.

Compliance & Security:

• Provides strategic direction in designing robust security measures to protect data and applications in multi-tenant environments, developing strategies for implementing encryption techniques and access controls.
• Provides strategic direction for the execution of remediation plans to address identified security gaps, ensuring ongoing improvement of security measures across the organization.
• Develops documentation and cloud infrastructure strategies to ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.

Automation & Change Management:

• Oversees the development and maintenance of enterprise-level automation tools and strategies (e.g., Infrastructure as Code (IaC)).
• Drives strategic alignment of change management plans across the organization for patching, updating, and rolling back applications, and drives innovation in the design of systems that allow for automation of these processes.

Core Responsibilities

Planning & Execution:

• Provides strategic oversight on the management and execution of large-scale projects or initiatives, monitoring timelines, deliverables, and budgets (when applicable) to ensure success.
• Sets strategies for appropriately delegating work, setting priorities, and aligning projects with business needs.
• Drives the strategic planning process across teams, providing guidance on resources or timelines in anticipation of changes.

Collaboration & Partnership:

• Sets a strategic direction for collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment of expectations and strategic objectives.
• Drives a culture of teamwork, empowering teams to build and maintain partnerships with business leaders, stakeholders, and/or customers to contribute to organizational success.
• Promotes a culture of transparency and inclusivity where all voices are valued and respected.

Problem Solving:

• Develops and implements strategies for specialized, advanced problem-solving efforts across the organization, serving as an escalation point for highly complex operational and/or technical issues.
• Oversees teams leveraging innovative techniques to address significant ambiguous issues, identify root causes, and prevent recurrence, reviewing solutions as needed.

Continuous Learning:

• Champions continuous learning to maintain cutting-edge skills and influence organizational best practices.
• Inspires teams to build and maintain expertise in relevant areas by proactively monitoring emerging trends, technologies, and industry standards to help position the organization as an industry leader.
• Contributes to the organization’s strategy for learning and development, influencing leadership to foster learning opportunities for the team.

Continuous Improvement:

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