Director, Production and Infrastructure Engineering

Trase Systems • Seattle, WA

1d • $240,000 - $290,000

About The Position

Trase Systems is seeking an engineering leader to build and lead its Production and Infrastructure Engineering organization. The role manages engineers across DevOps, SRE, DevEx, and MLOps, as well as a dedicated support team, and is accountable for team performance, development, and delivery across these functions.

The leader should have a strong foundation in infrastructure and software engineering and remain sufficiently close to the work to guide technical decisions, challenge assumptions, and help resolve difficult problems. Hands-on contributions include design and code reviews, technical investigations, and pairing when needed, while developing technical leads and delegating implementation to the team.

The position requires adaptability and the ability to organize ambiguous work, adjust plans as priorities change, and bring different technical disciplines together around clear outcomes. The leader will establish focus, make timely decisions, and build a team that delivers consistently. The role also partners with Product, Platform, Applied AI, Security/GRC, and stakeholders supporting Red Cell Partners, and requires some travel. Certain national security assignments may require U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a security clearance, depending on confirmed customer and contract requirements.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant engineering experience, including 5+ years of direct engineering people management, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• Track record of building teams, coaching platform or infrastructure engineers, managing performance, and delivering through technical leads; director-level candidates should demonstrate leadership across multiple engineering functions.
• Experience leading teams with different technical specialties and seniority levels.
• Strong planning, prioritization, delegation, and stakeholder communication skills, including the ability to resolve technical disagreements and align teams around shared outcomes.
• Strong technical foundation in at least one major cloud platform, such as GCP, AWS, or Azure, with practical experience in Kubernetes, containers, networking, identity, and production operations.
• Practical experience with Terraform, Git-based development workflows, GitOps, and CI/CD, including guiding repeatable environments, configuration control, and reliable deployments.
• Strong background building and shipping production software, with working depth across backend services, APIs, data stores, and full-stack integration.
• Ability to review code and designs, reason about application failures, and pair with engineers to unblock delivery.
• Experience leading production delivery and support, including reliability, incident response, release and change management, and collaboration on automated testing and end-to-end readiness.
• Demonstrated ability to bring structure to ambiguity, learn unfamiliar technical domains, and make timely decisions with incomplete information.
• Comfort shifting between people leadership, delivery issues, and technical discussions while maintaining team focus.
• Experience managing technical commitments and escalations with internal or external customers and translating their needs into feasible priorities and delivery plans.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with MLOps, model serving, or operating AI/ML and agent workloads, and ability to learn from and partner with specialists.
• Experience supporting customer-managed environments, multiple cloud providers, or enterprise deployments with complex integration needs.
• Experience in national security, federal, regulated, or other security-sensitive environments and partnering with Security/GRC on engineering requirements.
• Experience scaling an engineering organization or building a new team or operating function in a fast-changing company.

Responsibilities

• Own hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, career development, and performance management; coach junior engineers, develop technical leads, set expectations, and provide candid feedback.
• Set shared priorities and clear responsibilities across infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, testing, and application delivery; delegate execution, resolve disagreements, and hold engineers accountable for decisions and commitments.
• Lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, capacity planning, and delivery reviews with technical leads and TPMs; turn ambiguous goals into actionable work, manage dependencies and scope, and balance roadmap delivery with incidents and customer support.
• Replan as conditions change and communicate delivery tradeoffs.
• Participate in design and code reviews, technical investigations, and pairing sessions when needed to guide practical solutions and unblock the team.
• Make reliability, release and change management, QA, and end-to-end validation part of the delivery process; assign accountable owners and establish readiness criteria with feature teams.
• Ensure testing, operational documentation, and rollback plans support release decisions.
• Lead improvements to cloud infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, observability, on-call readiness, and incident response.
• Prioritize work that reduces recurring incidents and developer friction, and use delivery, reliability, recovery, and support metrics to guide investment.
• Manage the dedicated Red Cell Partners support team of full-stack engineers, DevOps engineers, and a TPM; align priorities, staffing, delivery commitments, and support expectations with stakeholders.
• Resolve dependencies across application and infrastructure teams and maintain clear escalation paths.
• Partner with Product, Platform, Applied AI, and Security/GRC on delivery priorities, operational readiness, and applicable customer requirements; surface risks, secure decisions, and ensure follow-through on engineering commitments.

Benefits

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows.
• 100% employer-paid comprehensive health care, including medical, dental, and vision for employees and their families.
• Paid maternity and paternity leave for 14 weeks at normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401(k), FSA, and equity incentives.
• Mental health benefits through Tara Mind.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed