Senior Director, AI Factory

Nutanix•San Jose, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Opportunity: Senior Director, Engineering - AI Factory This role is based in San Jose, CA FUNCTION at Nutanix: Your role : This role will lead the development and deployment of AI Factory solutions across various enterprises to include key responsibilities including: Building and scaling AI factories by creating reference architectures and models ensuring the delivery of continuous operations. Proven technical leadership with hands-on experience building scalable operational systems in highly complex environments. On-going collaboration with engineering teams, as well as technical product teams to guide product roadmap features and customer-specific requirements.

Requirements

Kubernetes Native Leadership: Proven track record of building and scaling production-grade platforms on Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, or On-Prem). You must deeply understand the "plumbing" of container orchestration at the infrastructure layer.
Inference & Serving Expertise: Direct experience building or managing high-performance inference pipelines (vLLM, TGI, or NVIDIA NIM) and AI Gateways that handle rate-limiting, load balancing, and model routing.
Platform Engineering Mindset: Experience building "Product-as-a-Service" for internal or external developers. You know how to create a seamless UX for AI Practitioners while maintaining the rigorous RBAC, security, and governance required by Enterprise IT.
Distributed Systems Architecture: Strong technical foundation in building multi-cluster or hybrid-cloud control planes (MCP) that can manage workloads across diverse geographical or cloud boundaries.
Strategic Execution: Ability to translate abstract market shifts (e.g., the move from RAG to Agentic AI) into a concrete engineering roadmap that bypasses "hype" for actual enterprise utility.
Proven experience in AI development.
Knowledge of the AI marketplace, technology.
Strong commercial acumen and customer-centric mindset.
Exceptional communication and influence skills, with credibility at VP+
Ability to confidently present to the C-level.
Demonstrated success in leading complex, cross-functional initiatives.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, matrixed environment and navigate ambiguity with confidence.

Nice To Haves

Hybrid-Cloud Savvy: Deep understanding of the Nutanix stack or similar hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI) and how they intersect with public cloud AI services.
Fine-Tuning Mastery: Experience implementing automated pipelines for PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning) such as LoRA/QLoRA within a multi-tenant environment.
GPU Economics: Practical knowledge of GPU resource optimization, including fractional GPU sharing (MIG), energy-efficient inference, and cost-per-token optimization.
Open-Source Contributor: Active involvement or leadership in the CNCF, Kubeflow, or broader LLM developer communities (Hugging Face, LangChain, etc.).
Advanced Degree: An MS or PhD in Computer Science, with a focus on Distributed Systems or Machine Learning, is preferred—provided it is paired with a "builder" mentality.
Strategic thinker with a bias for action and results.
Highly collaborative and adaptable, with strong relationship-building skills.
Comfortable operating at both strategic and tactical levels.
Passionate about driving impact and enabling others to succeed.

Responsibilities

Building and scaling AI factories by creating reference architectures and models ensuring the delivery of continuous operations.
Proven technical leadership with hands-on experience building scalable operational systems in highly complex environments.
On-going collaboration with engineering teams, as well as technical product teams to guide product roadmap features and customer-specific requirements.

Benefits

full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits (including 401(k) eligibility and various paid time off benefits such as vacation, sick time, and parental leave)

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