What We NeedWe are seeking an experienced and inspiring Senior Manager, Infrastructure, Network and Cloud Engineering to lead the team that builds and operates the foundation our games run on: datacenter and compute, global network and edge services, and cloud platforms.
Based in Austin, TX, this role leads a distributed service and operations team across multiple sites and time zones. You will own how the team is staffed, how it spends its time, and how safely it operates, balancing on-call, project delivery, keep-the-lights-on work, and incident load across a hybrid estate spanning on-premises datacenters and public cloud.
This is first and foremost a leadership role, not a hands-on engineering one. Technical direction and roadmaps sit with our Staff+ engineers and Technical Program Managers, and you partner with them closely. What we need from you is judgment, structure, and communication: the ability to understand what your engineers are telling you, ask the questions that surface risk, and turn infrastructure complexity into decisions that studios, security, finance, and executive leadership can act on. Your leverage comes from the team you build, the clarity you create, and the conditions you set for others to do their best work. That said, this is not a domain you can lead from the outside. We are looking for someone whose career has been built in infrastructure, and who has the scar tissue to prove it.
What You Will Do- Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of network, cloud, and systems engineers, including hiring, performance management, career development, and succession planning.
- Own capacity planning for the team across all four demands on its time: on-call, project delivery, KTLO, and incident response. Make the trade-offs explicit, and say no clearly when the math does not work.
- Translate technical roadmaps set by Staff+ engineers and TPMs into staffing plans, sequencing, and realistic commitments, and flag early when scope and capacity have diverged.
- Run a service and operations team to a high standard: on-call rotations that are humane and sustainable, clear escalation paths, defined ownership, and follow-through on action items after every incident.
- Ensure the team is well prepared for major incidents, including trained and confident Incident Commanders, rehearsed escalation and communication paths, and blameless post-incident review that actually changes the system.
- Hold the team to its engineering standards, including Infrastructure-as-Code, Git-based change management, peer review, documentation, and monitoring, understanding why these patterns matter operationally and what good looks like, while trusting your engineers on the implementation.
- Set the norms for transparency and communication that let a distributed team operate safely and with confidence: written-first, decisions recorded, status visible without anyone having to ask.
- Partner with studio, SRE, and security teams as their operational counterpart, shaping capacity plans, launch readiness, and support models well ahead of ship dates.
- Own cloud spend and datacenter capacity for your area, with clear forecasting, allocation, and optimization practices.
- Represent infrastructure to leadership and to non-technical stakeholders through concise written updates, clear risk framing, and honest status.
- Manage vendor and partner relationships alongside procurement and contract cycles, including evaluation, negotiation support, and performance review.
- Build follow-the-sun coverage and healthy working norms across sites, so the team scales without burning out.
Who We Think Will Be a Great Fit- Significant experience leading engineering teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent.
- A career built in infrastructure, network, cloud, or platform organizations. You have spent years close to production systems and understand the work because you have lived it, whether your seat was engineering, operations leadership, or technical program management. Adjacent-industry management experience alone will not prepare you for this team.
- You have been accountable for production infrastructure during a major incident or a high-stakes launch, and can talk credibly about what went wrong and what you changed afterwards.
- Direct experience managing a service or operations team carrying production and on-call responsibility, not only project-based delivery teams.
- Demonstrated capacity planning ability. You can model a team's load across on-call, delivery, KTLO, and incidents, and defend the resulting plan to leadership.
- Working understanding of the Incident Commander role and modern incident management practice, enough to staff the rotation, coach your ICs, and hold the communication line during a major incident.
- Proven experience leading globally distributed teams through asynchronous communication, where written clarity and timezone-aware process replace hallway conversations.
- Enough fluency in cloud, Infrastructure-as-Code, and networking concepts to follow a technical discussion, weigh risk, and know when to escalate or bring in expertise. We are not looking for someone to design or build the systems themselves.
- Comfort with hybrid environments. You understand why not everything moves to the cloud, and can hold a balanced conversation about the trade-offs.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication. You can brief an executive in five sentences, run a productive disagreement with a peer team, and give an engineer feedback they can actually use.
- Experience in gaming, media, or another latency-sensitive, launch-driven industry is a plus.
- You thrive when leading technical teams through ambiguous, high-impact work, and you measure your success by the systems your team runs and the engineers they become.
#LI-Hybrid
