Engineering Director

Who you are

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 10+ years of software development or engineering experience, including 4+ years of engineering management experience
• Significant experience leading infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or platform teams responsible for production systems at scale
• Deep experience designing and operating highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Strong knowledge of AWS and cloud-native infrastructure, including Kubernetes/EKS, EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, load balancing, networking, storage, IAM, monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code technologies such as Terraform
• Deep understanding of MySQL operations, including performance, replication, clustering, backup, and disaster recovery
• Strong knowledge of asynchronous architectures, including message queues, worker systems, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery
• Experience building strong production reliability practices, including observability, incident management, on-call operations, disaster recovery, multi-region architectures, and zero-downtime migrations
• A track record of materially improving cloud efficiency and infrastructure unit economics without compromising reliability or performance
• Experience operating latency-sensitive, high-throughput AI inference workloads in production; GPU inference optimization experience is a plus
• Experience scaling infrastructure to support rapid product and customer growth, including both self-serve products and enterprise customers with demanding security, reliability, and compliance requirements
• Ability to move effectively between architecture, operational data, financial analysis, organizational design, and executive communication, with strong cross-functional influence
• Ability to use AI-assisted engineering and operational tools to improve team productivity, incident response, diagnostics, and infrastructure management
• Familiarity with relevant application technologies such as Python, Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets

What the job involves

• Otter.ai is seeking a Director of Engineering, Infrastructure to lead the teams that power our products at scale. This leader will own our cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, DevOps, site reliability practices, and production operations
• This is a hands-on, high-impact leadership role for someone who can set infrastructure strategy while going deep on critical technical and operational challenges. You will partner closely with Product, Product Engineering, AI/ML, Security, and Finance to deliver a platform that is reliable, scalable, secure, developer-friendly, and cost-efficient
• Own the architecture and operation of cloud, compute, networking, database, production, and AI inference infrastructure
• Translate business and product plans into infrastructure roadmaps, capacity requirements, staffing plans, and investment decisions
• Ensure production infrastructure is reliable, scalable, secure, performant, and cost-efficient
• Establish infrastructure metrics, engineering standards, observability, and clear accountability, proactively surfacing risks and opportunities
• Improve developer velocity through automation, CI/CD, and self-service tooling
• Strengthen incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity practices
• Partner with AI/ML teams to optimize inference performance, reliability, resource utilization, and cost
• Embed access control, compliance, and risk management into infrastructure architecture and operations
• Recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing infrastructure engineering organization as a technically credible player-coach
• Communicate infrastructure priorities, risks, investments, and tradeoffs clearly to the executive team, and partner with Engineering and Finance on cost and capacity decisions

Benefits

• Compensation: With highly competitive salaries and equity option packages, everyone's an owner here.
• Hybrid Working: You can mix and match working from our Mountain View or San Francisco office, plus a couple days from home.
• Social Gatherings: Quarterly gatherings in the Bay Area for some team real fun and authentic connection.
• Health and Wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability, and wellness benefits that start the first day you do.
• PTO: Start with a minimum of 15 days of paid time off, plus up to 18 weeks for maternity leave and 8 weeks for paternity leave.
• 401(k): Plans to help meet your retirement goals because we care about your future.