Director, Production and Infrastructure Engineering

Red Cell Partners • Seattle, WA

23h

About The Position

Red Cell Partners is seeking an Engineering Leader to build and lead Trase Systems’ Production and Infrastructure Engineering organization. The role manages engineers across DevOps, SRE, developer experience (DevEx), and MLOps, as well as a dedicated support team. The leader is accountable for team performance, development, and delivery across these functions, combining a strong infrastructure and software engineering foundation with hands-on technical guidance through design and code reviews, investigations, and pairing when needed. The role also develops technical leads and delegates implementation to the team.

The position calls for an adaptable leader who can bring structure to ambiguous work, adjust plans as priorities change, and align varied technical disciplines around clear outcomes. The leader will oversee team development and performance, cross-functional planning and delivery, production and release readiness, operational improvements, and collaboration with internal stakeholders and customers.

Trase Systems, co-founded in 2023, provides an end-to-end platform for deploying, managing, and optimizing enterprise AI. Its work includes AI agent applications for complex industries such as healthcare, oil and gas, and national security. Some travel is required. 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, with strong planning, prioritization, delegation, stakeholder communication, and conflict-resolution skills.
• 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, and ability to guide 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; able to review code and designs, reason about application failures, and pair with engineers.
• 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 structure ambiguous work, learn unfamiliar technical domains, and make timely decisions with incomplete information while maintaining team focus.
• Experience managing technical commitments and escalations with internal or external customers and translating needs into feasible priorities and delivery plans.
• Some travel is required.
• 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.

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

• Build and develop the team through hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, career development, coaching, and performance management.
• Set shared priorities and responsibilities across infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, testing, and application delivery; delegate work, 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, balance roadmap delivery with incidents and customer support, and communicate tradeoffs as conditions change.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through design and code reviews, technical questions, investigations, and pairing when needed; connect application behavior with deployment and operational concerns and guide practical solutions.
• Make reliability, release and change management, QA, and end-to-end validation part of delivery; assign accountable owners, establish readiness criteria, and 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; use delivery, reliability, recovery, and support metrics to assess results and 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, 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.
• Manage technical commitments and escalations with internal or external customers and translate their needs into feasible priorities and delivery plans.

Benefits

• 100% employer-paid comprehensive health care, including medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their families.
• Paid maternity and paternity leave for 14 weeks at employees’ 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.
• Cost-effective GLP-1 solutions through Crux.
• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement as the firm grows, based on strong performance.

What This Job Offers

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