VP of Engineering - Infinia

This is an incredible opportunity to be part of a company that has been at the forefront of AI and high-performance data storage innovation for over two decades. DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a global market leader renowned for powering many of the world's most demanding AI data centers, in industries ranging from life sciences and healthcare to financial services, autonomous cars, Government, academia, research and manufacturing.

"DDN's A3I solutions are transforming the landscape of AI infrastructure." – IDC 

“The real differentiator is DDN. I never hesitate to recommend DDN. DDN is the de facto name for AI Storage in high performance environments” - Marc Hamilton, VP, Solutions Architecture & Engineering | NVIDIA 

DDN is the global leader in AI and multi-cloud data management at scale. Our cutting-edge data intelligence platform is designed to accelerate AI workloads, enabling organizations to extract maximum value from their data. With a proven track record of performance, reliability, and scalability, DDN empowers businesses to tackle the most challenging AI and data-intensive workloads with confidence. 

Our success is driven by our unwavering commitment to innovation, customer-centricity, and a team of passionate professionals who bring their expertise and dedication to every project. This is a chance to make a significant impact at a company that is shaping the future of AI and data management. 

Our commitment to innovation, customer success, and market leadership makes this an exciting and rewarding role for a driven professional looking to make a lasting impact in the world of AI and data storage. 

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is seeking an experienced and technically visionary Vice President of Engineering to lead the Infinia organization, which is the foundation of DDN’s flagship AI-native distributed data infrastructure.

This is a senior executive leadership role overseeing a global team of approximately 90 engineers, with direct responsibility for defining the storage platform strategy, scaling execution, and delivering performance-critical, fault-tolerant distributed systems that power AI/ML, HPC, and enterprise data pipelines at scale.

The ideal candidate will bring 15+ years of experience in systems and storage engineering, with a track record of building and scaling foundational platform components, and leading large, multi-team organizations in mission-critical environments. Deep expertise in storage systems and low-level infrastructure is essential.

This is a hands-on strategic leadership role with wide impact. You will shape how data is stored, accessed, and moved across DDN’s global customer base.

Key Responsibilities

Storage Platform & Systems Leadership
 Lead and grow engineering teams responsible for critical infrastructure underpinning the Infinia distributed data platform, including:

• Storage stack performance and optimization (including SPDK-based I/O)
• Task scheduling, concurrency, and orchestration
• Distributed locking and metadata coordination (DLM, KVStore)
• Multi-tenant data isolation and scalability (TDS)
• Network I/O and event-driven communication
• Reliability, observability, and profiling infrastructure
• Filesystem client access and high-throughput data paths

Strategic Direction & Technical Execution

• Define and execute the architectural vision for Infinia’s core platform, with a focus on scalable, performant, and highly available storage systems.
• Oversee roadmap development, cross-functional alignment, and high-quality execution across multiple teams.
• Ensure platform consistency, performance standards, and maintainability through rigorous design and technical reviews.

Organizational Scale & Talent Development

• Hire, coach, and retain top-tier engineering talent and technical leaders across multiple teams and geographies.
• Cultivate a high-performance engineering culture rooted in ownership, velocity, and system-level thinking.
• Guide career development, succession planning, and organizational evolution aligned to business and technology goals.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Collaborate with product, customer success, SRE, and field teams to define platform requirements, feature priorities, and SLAs.
• Anticipate storage performance and scalability needs across workloads and customer use cases.
• Advocate for core platform investments that accelerate roadmap delivery and system resilience.

Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Champion end-to-end system observability, diagnostics, and performance profiling.
• Establish internal metrics and processes to track uptime, throughput, memory/network efficiency, and regression stability.
• Lead incident management practices to reduce MTTR and ensure continuous service improvement.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in systems software, storage engineering, or infrastructure platforms.
• 8+ years in senior engineering leadership roles, including managing managers and leading large multi-functional teams.
• Deep expertise in storage architectures, filesystems, I/O optimization, and distributed data systems.
• Strong proficiency in low-level systems programming (C/C++/Rust), concurrency, memory management, and performance tuning.
• Proven ability to deliver platform software at the intersection of performance, reliability, and scale.
• Strong technical judgment, executive communication skills, and ability to drive cross-functional alignment in fast-paced environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with SPDK, RDMA, DPDK, or other high-throughput storage/network stacks.
• Familiarity with distributed coordination, key-value stores, and metadata scaling.
• Background in AI/ML, high-performance computing, or cloud-native infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes, microservices).
• Expertise in observability, tracing, and system profiling frameworks (e.g., OpenTelemetry, perf, Prometheus).

Success Metrics – First 30 Days

Strategic Alignment

• Ramp up on Infinia’s storage components, team structures, and technical roadmap.
• Meet with all direct reports, team leads, and cross-functional partners to assess execution posture and architectural maturity.

Early Impact

• Identify initial areas for architectural alignment, platform risk mitigation, or performance uplift.
• Deliver a 90-day executive plan covering priorities across reliability, performance, and organizational scale.

Team Integration

• Build trust and alignment with senior ICs and managers.
• Begin addressing key hiring and organizational structure needs to support future scale.

Success Metrics – Beyond 30 Days

• Timely and high-quality delivery of storage platform milestones aligned to product strategy.
• Measurable improvements in performance, uptime, and platform reliability across subsystems.
• Demonstrable reduction in latency spikes, failure domains, and architectural bottlenecks.
• High team engagement, retention, and momentum in executing against long-term business goals.

Join our dynamic and driven team, where engineering excellence is at the heart of everything we do. We seek individuals who love to challenge themselves and are fueled by curiosity. Here, you'll have the opportunity to work across various areas of the company, thanks to our flat organizational structure that encourages hands-on involvement and direct contributions to our mission. Leadership is earned by those who take initiative and consistently deliver outstanding results, both in their work ethic and deliverables, making strong prioritization skills essential. Additionally, we value strong communication skills in all our engineers and researchers, as they are crucial for the success of our teams and the company as a whole.

Interview Process: After submitting your application, one of our recruiters will review your resume. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to a 30-minute interview during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the interview, you will enter the main process, which can consist of up to four interviews in total:

• Coding assessment: Often in a language of your choice.
• Systems design: Translate high-level requirements into a scalable, fault-tolerant service (depending on role).
• Real-time problem-solving: Demonstrate practical skills in a live problem-solving session.
• Meet and greet with the wider team.
• Our goal is to finish the main process in 2-3 weeks at most.

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender, sex stereotyping, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, protected Veteran Status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

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