Data Center Operations and Maintenance Engineering Leader

Designworks Talent

$130K — $180K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years in Operations, Site Reliability, Infrastructure Operations, or related fields.
  • Experience in scaling operations teams in AI or cloud infrastructure environments.
  • Expertise in production operations and incident management.
  • Proven ability in leading cross-functional teams during critical incidents.
  • Strong understanding of compute, networking, and storage technologies.
  • Demonstrated success in establishing operational processes in high-growth settings.
  • Excellent communication skills with capacity to influence leadership.

Responsibilities

  • Build and mentor high-performing Operations & Maintenance teams.
  • Develop operational strategies and organizational structures for AI infrastructure.
  • Establish and manage processes for incident response and service reliability.
  • Lead major incident management efforts with executive communication.
  • Drive operational excellence with proactive monitoring and continuous improvement.
  • Collaborate with Engineering for operational readiness on new deployments.
  • Define operational KPIs and service level objectives across infrastructure.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
  • 401(k) plan with company match.
  • Paid holidays each calendar year.
  • Potential for merit increases and annual bonuses based on performance.
Full Job Description
Data Center Operations and Maintenance Engineering Leader

Location: Hybrid | Bellevue, WA Area
Titles: Senior and Staff (multiple roles available)

Lead the Operations Organization Behind Next-Generation AI Infrastructure

The Opportunity

This is a leadership role responsible for building and scaling the Operations & Maintenance function supporting mission-critical AI infrastructure. Depending on experience, responsibilities may range from leading a regional operations team to defining the long-term operational strategy across multiple facilities.

You will partner closely with Engineering, Infrastructure, Networking, Hardware, and Customer Operations leadership to create a highly reliable, scalable operating model capable of supporting one of the industry's most advanced AI infrastructure platforms.

What You'll Do
  • Build, lead, mentor, and grow high-performing Operations & Maintenance teams.
  • Develop the operational strategy, organizational structure, and execution model supporting large-scale AI infrastructure.
  • Establish world-class operational processes, including incident response, change management, problem management, and service reliability.
  • Lead major incident management efforts and executive communications during production events.
  • Drive operational excellence through proactive monitoring, observability, automation, and continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Partner with Engineering to ensure operational readiness for new infrastructure deployments and platform launches.
  • Define service level objectives (SLOs), operational KPIs, and reliability metrics across the infrastructure portfolio.
  • Build scalable on-call programs, escalation models, runbooks, and operational governance.
  • Champion root cause analysis and long-term corrective actions to improve platform resilience.
  • Influence infrastructure architecture and operational tooling to improve availability, efficiency, and customer experience.
  • Help shape the long-term operations organization as the company expands globally.
What We're Looking For
  • Experience leading Operations, Site Reliability, Infrastructure Operations, Data Center Operations, or Production Engineering organizations.
  • Proven success building or scaling operations teams within cloud infrastructure, hyperscale environments, AI infrastructure, or large distributed systems.
  • Deep expertise in production operations, incident management, service reliability, and operational excellence.
  • Experience leading cross-functional teams during high-severity production incidents.
  • Strong understanding of infrastructure operations across compute, networking, storage, and hardware environments.
  • Demonstrated success building operational processes, organizational structure, and scalable support models in high-growth environments.
  • Executive-level communication skills with the ability to influence engineering and business leadership.
  • Comfortable operating in an early-stage organization where many systems and processes are being built for the first time.
Preferred Qualifications
  • Experience supporting hyperscale cloud platforms, GPU infrastructure, AI platforms, HPC environments, or large-scale data centers.
  • Experience with modern observability and monitoring platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or similar technologies.
  • Familiarity with incident management platforms including PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or equivalent solutions.
  • Experience implementing operational maturity frameworks and reliability engineering best practices.
  • Track record of building globally distributed operations organizations.
Compensation
  • Competitive base pay for Bellevue market
  • Certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, including merit increases, annual bonus, and stock. These awards are allocated based on individual performance
  • U.S. based employees have access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan and company match, employees also receive per calendar year, paid holidays.


Location
  • Hybrid role based in the Bellevue, WA area.
  • Approximately three days per week in the office.
  • U.S. work authorization is required. Visa sponsorship is not currently available.


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