DDN is seeking a Manager to lead our DevOps engineering team supporting Infinia Software Defined Storage (SDS). Infinia SDS is designed to support multiple client protocols, delivering robust, enterprise-grade storage solutions for cutting-edge use cases in both on-premises and cloud environments.
This role is ideal for a strategic leader who excels at building high-performing teams, driving operational excellence, and aligning DevOps initiatives with business objectives in a fast-paced, innovation-driven environment.
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership & Development
- Build, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of DevOps engineers across global locations.
- Conduct hiring, performance management, career development, and succession planning.
- Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, continuous learning, and operational excellence.
- Manage team capacity and resource allocation to ensure delivery of critical initiatives.
Strategic Planning & Execution
- Define and drive the DevOps roadmap in partnership with engineering, product, and infrastructure leadership.
- Align DevOps initiatives with business goals, ensuring infrastructure supports product development velocity and customer success.
- Balance innovation with operational stability, making strategic decisions on technology adoption and infrastructure investments.
- Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless delivery of software-defined storage solutions.
Operational Excellence & Process Management
- Establish and maintain SLAs, incident response processes, and on-call rotations while ensuring team health and work-life balance.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives to enhance deployment speed, reliability, and infrastructure efficiency.
- Implement metrics and KPIs to measure team performance, infrastructure health, and operational effectiveness.
- Champion DevOps best practices and automation across the organization.
Infrastructure & Technology Oversight
- Provide strategic direction for infrastructure-as-code initiatives, cloud and on-premises infrastructure, and CI/CD pipeline development.
- Guide technology evaluation and adoption decisions for DevOps tooling and platforms.
- Ensure infrastructure scalability, security, and reliability to support enterprise-grade storage solutions.
- Oversee integration of build and release acceleration tools to optimize development workflows.
Stakeholder Communication & Collaboration
- Communicate technical progress, challenges, and roadmap to senior leadership and cross-functional partners.
- Partner with development, QA, and product teams to align infrastructure capabilities with product requirements.
- Manage vendor relationships and technology partnerships related to DevOps infrastructure.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience managing DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering teams, preferably in enterprise software or storage solutions.
- Strong leadership background with proven ability to build, mentor, and retain high-performing engineering teams.
- Experience managing teams across multiple locations or time zones is a plus.
- Proven track record of operational excellence including incident management, on-call processes, and SLA management.
- Strategic thinking with the ability to define technical vision and roadmap while balancing competing priorities.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence cross-functional teams and translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong project and resource management capabilities with experience prioritizing work across competing initiatives.
- Experience partnering with engineering, product, and leadership teams to align infrastructure initiatives with business goals.
Preferred Skills
- General familiarity with DevOps practices and modern infrastructure concepts (cloud, containers, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code).
- Background in enterprise software, storage systems, or infrastructure products.
- Experience scaling DevOps teams and practices in high-growth environments.
- Budget management and vendor relationship experience.
