Senior Director, Production Engineering

The Opportunity at Altana

As the Senior Director of Production Engineering, you’ll lead a team that not only ensures the seamless operation of our technology infrastructure but also plays a hands-on role in building and innovating the systems that drive our company’s success. This team is key to scaling our business and delivering value to a diverse range of customers. By architecting secure, reliable, and cutting-edge infrastructure, we empower our teams to create exceptional user experiences; directly fueling our growth and market leadership.

In this role, you will lead the charge in creating scalable, reliable, and secure cloud infrastructures while driving operational excellence. You’ll be responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of our global services and anticipating future needs to support the company’s growth. This position requires a technical leader with the vision and expertise to build robust systems, but also the strategic mindset to empower employees with the tools and technology they need to excel. By enhancing productivity and continuously improving our infrastructure, you’ll ensure that our teams can innovate and our services can scale without disruption.

Key areas under your stewardship include:

• Cloud Engineering: You will design, manage, and secure the cloud infrastructure that powers our company’s products. This team builds multi-cloud architectures that are scalable, flexible, and resilient, ensuring that our platforms can handle increasing workloads while maintaining high performance, security, and cost performance. In addition to traditional cloud infrastructure, Cloud Engineering also oversees the integration and management of data platforms that support data analytics, machine learning, and large-scale data processing. These platforms enable our teams to work with massive datasets, derive insights, and build data-driven solutions, further empowering innovation and enhancing product capabilities.
• Site Reliability: You will ensure our systems are reliable, available, and efficient. The SRE team constantly monitors the performance of our services, identifies bottlenecks, and works proactively to prevent issues before they impact users. By focusing on system stability, performance optimization, and incident management, the SRE team ensures our services run smoothly and can recover quickly from any disruptions.
• DevOps: You will bridge the gap between development and operations, enabling the delivery of our product by automating and optimizing the entire software development lifecycle, from code development to deployment and monitoring. Through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, the DevOps team ensures that new features and updates are deployed rapidly and efficiently. They are also responsible for maintaining infrastructure as code, enabling consistent and scalable infrastructure management, allowing our engineers to innovate without worrying about underlying systems.

Your Responsibilities

Technical Strategy & Execution:

• Define and implement a clear technical strategy, ensuring the team remains focused on the highest-priority work while adhering to strategic goals.
• Oversee the development of scalable, reliable, and secure production systems by leading architecture discussions and providing strategic technical guidance.
• Work closely with engineers on issues related to scalability, performance, and efficiency, making key decisions that ensure both the short-term and long-term health of our infrastructure.
• Balance immediate operational needs with strategic priorities, ensuring efficient use of resources while maintaining focus on long-term objectives.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement:

• Collaborate across the organization to align engineering efforts with business objectives, fostering a seamless integration between production engineering and other departments.

Operational Excellence:

• Establish and continuously improve best practices for monitoring, incident response, automation, and system performance optimization.
• Drive a culture of ownership, resilience, and accountability to ensure high availability, performance, and security in our production environments.
• Conduct regular post-incident reviews and capacity planning to anticipate and mitigate risks before they become problems.

Team Leadership & Development:

• Lead, coach, and inspire a team of engineers, from varying levels of experience, across software, systems, and infrastructure domains.
• Guide team members through complex technical challenges, enabling them to develop their skills and contribute to high-impact projects.
• Manage remote teams across multiple time zones, maintaining alignment and fostering a cohesive corporate culture in a distributed work environment.
• Work closely with recruiting teams to hire top-tier talent, expanding the production engineering team with individuals who have relevant backgrounds and skill sets.
• Foster professional development, recognizing outstanding performance and addressing underperformance in a timely, constructive manner.

About You

• Experience building, leading, and developing best-in-class engineering teams, especially in a rapidly scaling environment, and have led or been part of a rapidly scaling organization
• 7+ years of real-world experience developing or managing complex engineering systems
• Track record of success tackling large-scale infrastructure in support of fast-paced ML/AI-enabled products and services
• A hands-on leader who leads from the front, and is willing to help the team deliver
• Strong sense of shared ownership and a collaborative disposition
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Experience managing relationships across diverse groups including internal and external organizations such as product, commercial, infrastructure and implementation teams, as well as with external groups such as vendors and staff augmentation providers
• You’re a top notch recruiter
• You don’t hesitate to go to the dentist during the work day, but you’re also the person that’s on your laptop working on the team’s hardest problems to relax

This role can be based in New York City, Washington D.C., or the San Francisco Bay Area with an expectation of hybrid work or occasional travel as needed.