Director, Production and Infrastructure Engineering

Trase Systems, Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Unlimited PTO

Professional development

401K with company match

Job summary

Trase Systems, Inc. seeks an Engineering Leader to build and run its Production and Infrastructure Engineering org. You will manage DevOps, SRE, DevEx, MLOps and a support team, driving performance, development, and delivery across functions.

The role requires hands-on design/review work and mentoring, while unifying multiple disciplines toward clear outcomes. You will lead planning, release readiness, and infrastructure improvements, organizing ambiguous work and delivering reliable software in

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience.
• 5+ years of direct engineering people management.
• Experience leading multiple engineering functions.

Responsibilities

• Build and Develop the Team: hiring, onboarding, coaching, and performance management.
• Lead Across Technical Disciplines: set priorities across infra, reliability, developer experience, testing, delivery.
• Own Planning and Delivery: lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, capacity planning, reviews.
• Provide Hands-On Technical Leadership: participate in design/code reviews and investigations.
• Lead Production and Release Readiness: ensure reliability, release and change management, E2E readiness.
• Strengthen Operations and Developer Experience: improve cloud infra, CI/CD, observability, on-call readiness.
• Lead Dedicated Red Cell Partners Support: manage cross-functional team and TPM.
• Partner Across the Organization: work with Product, Platform, Applied AI, Security/GRC.

Skills

People leadership

Cross-functional execution

Cloud infrastructure

Terraform IaC

Software engineering

Delivery reliability

Incident response

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Kubernetes

GitOps

CI/CD

Job description

Director, Production and Infrastructure Engineering

Seattle, WA (Preferred) or Remote (USA)

About Us

Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig , Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security.

About the Role

We are seeking an Engineering Leader to build and lead our Production and Infrastructure Engineering organization. You will manage engineers across DevOps, SRE, DevEx, MLOps, and lead a dedicated support team. You will be accountable for team performance, development, and delivery across these functions.

You will bring a strong foundation in infrastructure and software engineering and stay close enough to the work to challenge assumptions, guide technical decisions, and help engineers resolve difficult problems. Your hands-on involvement will focus on design and code reviews, technical investigation, and pairing when needed, while developing technical leads and delegating implementation to the team.

This role calls for a nimble, adaptable leader who can organize ambiguous work, adjust plans as priorities change, and bring different technical disciplines together around clear outcomes. You will create focus, make timely decisions, and build a team that delivers consistently.

Responsibilities

• Build and Develop the Team: Own hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, career development, and performance management. Coach junior engineers, develop technical leads, and give senior specialists clear expectations and candid feedback. Build the skills and ownership needed for the team to operate effectively.
• Lead Across Technical Disciplines: Set shared priorities and clear responsibilities across infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, testing, and application delivery. Delegate technical execution to the appropriate leads, resolve disagreements, and hold engineers at every level accountable to agreed decisions and commitments.
• Own Planning and Delivery: Lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, capacity planning, and delivery reviews in partnership with technical leads and TPMs. Turn ambiguous goals into actionable work, manage dependencies and scope, and balance roadmap delivery with incidents and customer support. Replan quickly and communicate tradeoffs when conditions change.
• Provide Hands-On Technical Leadership: Participate in design and code reviews, ask informed questions, and join investigations or pairing sessions when the team is blocked. Use your infrastructure and software background to connect application behavior with deployment and operational concerns and guide practical solutions.
• Lead Production and Release Readiness: Make reliability, release and change management, QA, and E2E validation part of the team's delivery process. Assign accountable owners, establish readiness criteria with feature teams, and ensure testing, operational documentation, and rollback plans support release decisions.
• Strengthen Operations and Developer Experience: Lead the team's improvements to cloud infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, observability, on-call readiness, and incident response. Prioritize work that reduces recurring incidents and developer friction. Use delivery, reliability, recovery, and support metrics to assess results and guide investment.
• Lead Dedicated Red Cell Partners Support: Manage a cross-functional team of full-stack engineers, DevOps engineers, and a dedicated TPM. Align priorities, staffing, delivery commitments, and support expectations with stakeholders. Resolve dependencies across application and infrastructure teams and maintain clear escalation paths.
• Partner Across the Organization: Work with Product, Platform, Applied AI, and Security/GRC on delivery priorities, operational readiness, and applicable customer requirements. Surface risks early, secure decisions when needed, and ensure follow-through on engineering commitments.

Requirements

• Engineering People Leadership: 10+ years of relevant engineering experience, including 5+ years of direct engineering people management, or equivalent demonstrated experience. A track record of building teams, coaching engineers (platform, infrastructure), managing performance, and delivering through technical leads. Director-level candidates should demonstrate leadership across multiple engineering functions.
• Cross-Functional Execution: Experience leading teams with different technical specialties and seniority levels. Strong planning, prioritization, delegation, and stakeholder communication; able to resolve technical disagreements and keep teams aligned to shared outcomes.
• Cloud Infrastructure: A 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.
• Infrastructure as Code and Delivery Automation: Practical experience with Terraform, Git-based development workflows, GitOps, and CI/CD. Able to guide the team's approach to repeatable environments, configuration control, and reliable deployments.
• Software Engineering: A 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 to unblock delivery.
• Operational and Quality Leadership: Experience leading production delivery and support, including reliability, incident response, release and change management, and collaboration with engineers on automated testing and E2E readiness.
• Adaptability and Ownership: Demonstrated ability to bring structure to ambiguity, learn unfamiliar technical domains, and make timely decisions with incomplete information. Comfortable shifting between people leadership, delivery issues, and technical discussions while maintaining team focus.
• Customer and Partner Collaboration: Experience managing technical commitments and escalations with internal or external customers, and translating their needs into feasible priorities and delivery plans.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with MLOps, model serving, or operating AI/ML and agent workloads; able to learn from and partner with specialists in these areas.
• 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.

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. Some travel is required.

Salary Range: $240,000-290,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

#LI-RCP

For full-time roles only

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement withstrong performanceas the firm grows
• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
• Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
• Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind .

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Trase Systems’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.