Director of Software Engineering - Product & Platform Delivery

Runpod is the AI Developer Cloud, providing a platform used by over one million developers to scale AI workloads. The Director of Software Engineering will lead and scale the core cloud and bare-metal environments, ensuring high availability and performance for enterprise customers.

Responsibilities:

• Own Core Infrastructure & SRE: Lead multiple engineering teams responsible for Site Reliability Engineering, networking, and storage. Establish rigorous SRE practices, driving SLA/SLO definitions, incident response, observability, and automated remediation
• Architect HPC & Global Networking: Oversee the design, scaling, and operation of Runpod’s global network backbone, as well as ultra-low-latency HPC cluster networks. Drive the implementation and optimization of InfiniBand and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to support massive, multi-node GPU training workloads
• Drive Storage Engine Innovation: Direct the architecture and performance tuning of highly scalable, distributed storage systems. Ensure our storage engines can deliver the massive IOPS and throughput required to keep high-end GPUs fed with data during deep learning tasks
• Build a High-Output Org: Hire, mentor, and grow highly technical engineering managers and senior ICs (network architects, systems engineers, SREs). Create a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and craft in a remote-first environment
• Translate Scale into Strategy: Partner with Program Management and Product to forecast capacity requirements, shape technical roadmaps, and convert massive scale challenges into clear technical scopes, milestones, and measurable outcomes
• Continuously Improve Systems & Flow: Drive measurable improvements in infrastructure reliability and delivery metrics, such as deployment frequency, MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), infrastructure as code (IaC) coverage, and system uptime
• Architectural Stewardship: Provide architectural oversight for bare-metal provisioning, virtualization layers, network fabrics, and storage clusters, ensuring seamless scalability without becoming a bottleneck for your teams
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Coordinate cleanly with product delivery and platform teams to ensure the infrastructure primitives they rely on are robust, well-documented, and highly available

Requirements:

• Engineering Leadership Experience: 7+ years leading software, infrastructure, SRE, or networking teams, including managing managers and multiple squads, with a proven record of scaling high-availability cloud environments
• Deep Infrastructure Expertise: 8+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, bare-metal infrastructure, or public/private cloud platforms
• HPC & Advanced Networking: Proven hands-on background or strong architectural understanding of ultra-low latency networking. Deep familiarity with InfiniBand and/or RoCE, spine-leaf architectures, and global WAN routing protocols (BGP)
• Storage Systems Knowledge: Experience building, operating, or tuning high-performance distributed storage systems and parallel file systems (e.g., Ceph, Lustre, Weka, NVMe-oF) capable of handling heavy AI/ML I/O loads
• SRE / DevOps Culture: Strong foundation in reliability engineering, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and modern observability stacks
• Remote-First Operating Excellence: Experience building culture, accountability, and momentum across distributed technical teams
• Communication & Collaboration: Clear written and verbal communication, strong stakeholder management, and calm, decisive leadership during high-stakes operational incidents
• Background Check: Successful completion of a background check
• Direct experience architecting and operating infrastructure specifically optimized for massive GPU clusters and AI/ML workloads
• Deep understanding of hardware architectures, GPU interconnects (NVLink), and datacenter topology
• Track record of scaling infrastructure teams in hyper-growth startup environments
• Open-source contributions or active recognition within the infrastructure, networking, or Kubernetes communities