Director, Engineering – Release Engineering, DevOps & SRE

We're looking for a hands-on engineering leader to build and own the Release Engineering, SecDevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) functions for Infinia. This is a foundational role: you'll define how our software is built, secured, released, and kept running at enterprise scale. If you thrive at the intersection of infrastructure automation, operational excellence, and team building — and you want your work to directly shape the reliability and velocity of a market-leading storage platform — this is your role. WHAT YOU'LL DO RELEASE ENGINEERING • Own the end-to-end release pipeline — build systems, artifact management, versioning, and release gating • Drive automation of build, test, and packaging workflows to maximize developer velocity • Define release cadence, branching strategies, and code freeze processes with engineering leadership DEVOPS AND SECDEVOPS • Architect and operate scalable CI/CD pipelines and developer toolchains for on-prem and cloud • Embed security into the SDLC — SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, secrets management • Champion automation-first DevOps practices from commit to production delivery SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEERING • Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets; own incident response and post-mortem culture • Drive observability — logging, metrics, distributed tracing — across the platform • Influence reliability and operability early, at design and code-review stages • Lead capacity planning and infrastructure scaling decisions LEADERSHIP • Build, mentor, and grow teams across all three disciplines in a global, distributed org • Communicate roadmap and risks to senior leadership; partner cross-functionally with product, QA, and security WHAT YOU BRING • 12+ years in DevOps, Release Engineering, or SRE — with 5+ years managing engineering teams • Deep experience with CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Tekton, or similar) • Infrastructure-as-code fluency: Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, or equivalent • Container orchestration expertise: Kubernetes and Docker in production • Practical DevSecOps background — you've shipped security tooling, not just talked about it • SRE chops: SLO/SLI design, on-call frameworks, observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) • Strong communicator — you can translate complex technical tradeoffs for exec and non-technical audiences BONUS POINTS • Experience with storage, distributed systems, or infrastructure software • Familiarity with HPC, AI/ML infrastructure, or enterprise data platforms • Background scaling DevOps in high-growth, globally distributed environments • Exposure to SOC 2, ISO 27001, or FedRAMP compliance requirements WHY DDN • Work on infrastructure that underpins some of the world's most demanding AI and research workloads • Greenfield opportunity to shape Release Engineering, DevOps, and SRE from the ground up for Infinia • Collaborative, engineering-first culture that values autonomy, technical depth, and continuous learning • Competitive compensation, remote-first flexibility, and a team that genuinely enjoys solving hard problems Compensation: $250K - $300K