Director, Software Engineering - Infrastructure

ClickUp is an AI-native company building the future of work with a converged AI workspace. The Director of Software Engineering - Infrastructure will bridge infrastructure and product engineering, ensuring platform scalability and alignment with business goals while leading a distributed team.

Responsibilities:

• Drive significant annual infrastructure savings by migrating data workloads to EKS and self-hosting key services such as OpenSearch
• Deprecate legacy frontend ALBs and consolidate to a single EKS-managed ALB per shard, unblocking faster deployments across the org
• Eliminate single points of ownership across Networking, OpenSearch, and Terraform through cross-training and targeted hiring into coverage gaps
• Stand up a recurring alignment cadence with Product, AI, Enterprise, and Security so infra planning is driven by demand, not ad-hoc interrupts
• Ship automated shard buildout via Backstage to remove manual toil from enterprise scaling
• Cut P0/P1 incidents attributed to Cloud Platform (DNS, ALB misconfiguration) through hardened ingress patterns and Terraform-policy guardrails, including blocking unauthenticated public endpoints
• Deliver a roadmap covering Agent enablement, centralized IaC, and deployment rollout acceleration, tied to AI and Enterprise revenue goals
• 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
• Own multi-million-dollar AWS spend accountability and contractor oversight, with a savings-pipeline mindset baked into planning

Requirements:

• 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
• Education: BS/MS in CS, Engineering, or equivalent
• Experience: 10+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering, with significant time in a director-level role managing distributed teams
• AI/ML infrastructure experience (strong plus): Scaling workloads like GPU orchestration, model-serving infrastructure, or cost-optimized compute for inference