Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations

Velaura•Santa Clara, CA

2d•$250,000 - $300,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Velaura AI is seeking an experienced Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations to own IT and infrastructure end to end: the hybrid compute environment our designers depend on, the security program that protects our design IP, the systems behind the hardware lab, and the team that runs all of it. You'll lead our existing IT team and grow it. This is a build role, not a caretaking role. We need someone senior enough to set a 12–24 month architecture direction and hands-on enough to be in the middle of a storage decision, a scheduler-tuning problem, and a vendor negotiation in the same week. The ideal candidate will be productive on day one, at cohort scale, without IT becoming the bottleneck. Additionally they will: Ensure Compute and storage capacity is planned ahead of demand rather than in reaction to it; queue wait times and storage performance are measured and trending the right way. A new software engineer starts with repo access, a working build environment, and compute quota provisioned before they log in. IAM, endpoint, and access controls are in place and documented well enough to pass a customer security review. A disaster-recovery plan exists for every system a tape-out depends on, and it has been tested. Hands-on — you'd rather be inside the architecture and the troubleshooting than above it Scale-minded — you build for the company we're becoming, not the one we are today Engineering-oriented — you treat compute availability and storage performance as product-schedule items, because they are Security-conscious — you treat design data as the crown jewels and still find ways to say yes to engineers Pragmatic — you balance real controls against the speed a fast-growing company needs Steady — outages, security incidents, hiring waves, lab problems, and hard deadlines don't rattle you

Requirements

10+ years in IT infrastructure, including 5+ leading infrastructure and operations teams.
You've scaled an IT environment through rapid organizational growth, and can talk candidly about what broke.
Strong Linux and engineering-compute background; real depth in at least one major cloud (Azure, GCP or AWS) and comfort operating all.
Genuine expertise in enterprise networking (firewalls, VPNs, segmentation) and enterprise storage, virtualization, and DR.
Hands-on experience implementing IAM, MFA, endpoint management, logging, and enterprise security controls.
A track record of building the operational layer: service desk, asset management, budgets, vendor contracts, capacity planning

Nice To Haves

semiconductor, EDA, hardware, or AI-infrastructure experience
supporting a hardware organization and a software organization
software supply-chain security
familiarity with Cadence / Synopsys / Siemens EDA flows and HPC environments
having supported real tape-out deadlines
securing design IP and foundry data access, or working inside SOC 2, ISO 27001, or NIST frameworks
hardware lab or high-availability data center experience
infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, Python)
CISSP, CISM, CCNP, or a cloud architect certification

Responsibilities

Engineering compute. Partner with engineering leadership to forecast and optimize infrastructure for compute-intensive EDA workloads — RTL, verification, physical design, simulation, tape-out. Manage Linux HPC environments, workload schedulers (LSF, Slurm, or equivalent), and large-scale shared storage. Make sure infrastructure is ready ahead of design freezes and tape-outs, silicon bringup, and customer SDK releases, not during them.
Software infrastructure. Own CI/CD at scale, self-hosted runners, and cross-compilation and build farms across multiple target architectures; container and artifact registries, package and dependency mirroring, and reproducible build environments; Kubernetes for internal services and developer tooling; and source control that holds up at 200 people, with large artifacts and deep submodule trees.
Hybrid infrastructure. Architect and operate Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, on-prem servers, virtualization, storage, backups, and both corporate and lab networks. Build the capacity-planning discipline for compute, storage, bandwidth, licenses, and cloud resources — and make the build-vs-buy and cloud-vs-on-prem calls.
IP security. Stand up the program that protects RTL, physical-design databases, foundry data, and customer information: IAM with SSO, MFA, RBAC and privileged-access controls; endpoint security, DLP, encryption, vulnerability management; secure remote access; clear boundaries for employees, contractors, and partners. Lead us through customer security reviews and toward SOC 2 / ISO 27001 readiness — you own the outcome and decide the right mix of internal hires, MSPs, and specialist security firms to get there. Own the security controls around what we ship: open-source license compliance and SBOM generation for anything we redistribute, code signing and artifact provenance for SDK and OTA payloads, and secure key handling for signed images.
Lab and facilities technology. Own the IT infrastructure behind the hardware lab — including secure segmentation from corporate and engineering environments, lab access controls, test systems, and data collection, and reliable secure remote access for a distributed engineering team — and coordinate with operations on power, cooling, rack space, cabling, and UPS.
Employee technology. Build onboarding and offboarding that survives large hiring waves: standard images, role-based access profiles, day-one readiness. Run a service desk with real SLAs that engineers, executives, and lab users all actually find responsive.
Budget and team. Own IT OpEx and CapEx, cloud FinOps (tagging, chargeback, commitments), vendor selection and contracts, and asset management. Lead and grow the existing IT team, and decide the right mix of internal staff, MSPs, and specialists.