Engineering Director, Infrastructure

Otter.ai; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 244,000 - 313,000; Full time

Job summary

Otter.ai is seeking a Director of Engineering, Infrastructure to lead the teams powering our products at scale. You will own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, DevOps, SRE, and production operations, setting strategy while addressing critical technical challenges and partnering with Product, AI/ML, Security, and Finance.

You will drive reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency, while mentoring a high‑performing team and communicating priorities to the executive team.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field.
• 10+ years of software development or engineering experience, including 4+ years in engineering management.
• Significant experience leading infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or platform teams responsible for production systems at scale.
• Deep experience designing and operating highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and cloud-native infrastructure including Kubernetes/EKS, EC2, Auto Scaling, load balancing, IAM, monitoring and IaC like Terraform.
• Deep understanding of MySQL operations including performance, replication, clustering, backup and DR.
• Strong knowledge of asynchronous architectures, message queues, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
• Experience building production reliability practices including observability, incident management, on-call, DR and multi-region architectures.
• Track record of improving cloud efficiency and infrastructure unit economics without compromising reliability.
• Experience operating latency-sensitive AI inference workloads; GPU inference experience a plus.
• Ability to scale infrastructure to support rapid product/customer growth and enterprise security/compliance needs.
• Ability to move between architecture, data, finance, org design, and executive communication with cross-functional influence.
• Familiarity with Python, Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and operation of cloud, compute, networking, database, production, and AI inference infrastructure.
• Translate business plans into infrastructure roadmaps, capacity, staffing, and investments.
• Ensure infrastructure is reliable, scalable, secure, performant, and cost-efficient.
• Establish infrastructure metrics, standards, observability, and accountability; surface risks and opportunities.
• Improve developer velocity through automation, CI/CD, and self-service tooling.
• Strengthen incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity practices.
• Partner with AI/ML teams to optimize inference performance, reliability, resource use, and cost.
• Embed access control, compliance, and risk management into architecture and operations.
• Recruit, develop, and lead a high-performing infrastructure org as a credible technical leader.
• Communicate priorities, risks, investments, and tradeoffs to executives; work with Finance on cost/capacity decisions.

Skills

Cloud architecture

SRE/DevOps leadership

Distributed systems

AWS cloud native

Kubernetes/EKS

Terraform

MySQL operations

Async architectures

AI inference workloads

Cross-functional influence

Python/Django/FastAPI/WebSockets

Education

Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or related technical field

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

About the Role

Otter.ai is seeking a Director of Engineering, Infrastructure to lead the teams that power our products at scale. This leader will own our cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, DevOps, site reliability practices, and production operations.

This is a hands‑on, high-impact leadership role for someone who can set infrastructure strategy while going deep on critical technical and operational challenges. You will partner closely with Product, Product Engineering, AI/ML, Security, and Finance to deliver a platform that is reliable, scalable, secure, developer-friendly, and cost-efficient.

Your Impact

• Own the architecture and operation of cloud, compute, networking, database, production, and AI inference infrastructure.
• Translate business and product plans into infrastructure roadmaps, capacity requirements, staffing plans, and investment decisions.
• Ensure production infrastructure is reliable, scalable, secure, performant, and cost-efficient.
• Establish infrastructure metrics, engineering standards, observability, and clear accountability, proactively surfacing risks and opportunities.
• Improve developer velocity through automation, CI/CD, and self-service tooling.
• Strengthen incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity practices.
• Partner with AI/ML teams to optimize inference performance, reliability, resource utilization, and cost.
• Embed access control, compliance, and risk management into infrastructure architecture and operations.
• Recruit, develop, and lead a high‑performing infrastructure engineering organization as a technically credible player‑coach.
• Communicate infrastructure priorities, risks, investments, and tradeoffs clearly to the executive team, and partner with Engineering and Finance on cost and capacity decisions.

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of software development or engineering experience, including 4+ years of engineering management experience.
• Significant experience leading infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or platform teams responsible for production systems at scale.
• Deep experience designing and operating highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and cloud‑native infrastructure, including Kubernetes/EKS, EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, load balancing, networking, storage, IAM, monitoring, and infrastructure‑as‑code technologies such as Terraform.
• Deep understanding of MySQL operations, including performance, replication, clustering, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Strong knowledge of asynchronous architectures, including message queues, worker systems, retries, idempotency, and failure recovery.
• Experience building strong production reliability practices, including observability, incident management, on‑call operations, disaster recovery, multi‑region architectures, and zero‑downtime migrations.
• A track record of materially improving cloud efficiency and infrastructure unit economics without compromising reliability or performance.
• Experience operating latency‑sensitive, high‑throughput AI inference workloads in production; GPU inference optimization experience is a plus.
• Experience scaling infrastructure to support rapid product and customer growth, including both self‑serve products and enterprise customers with demanding security, reliability, and compliance requirements.
• Ability to move effectively between architecture, operational data, financial analysis, organizational design, and executive communication, with strong cross‑functional influence.
• Ability to use AI‑assisted engineering and operational tools to improve team productivity, incident response, diagnostics, and infrastructure management.
• Familiarity with relevant application technologies such as Python, Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets.

About Otter.ai

We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.

With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real‑time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in‑person and virtual meetings – turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.

Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are dedicated to inclusivity.

*Otter.ai does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd party recruitment agencies without a written agreement in place for permanent placements. Any resume or other candidate information submitted outside of established candidate submission guidelines (including through our website or via email to any Otter.ai employee) and without a written agreement otherwise will be deemed to be our sole property, and no fee will be paid should we hire the candidate.

Salary range

Salary Range: $244,000 to $313,000 USD per year.

This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of a comprehensive total rewards package. #LI-Hybrid