Director of Infrastructure

expo · Full-time · Posted 4d ago

About the Role

We're looking for a hands-on Director of Infrastructure to lead and scale the infrastructure systems that power our engineering and product organizations. This is a high-impact leadership role responsible for the reliability, scalability, performance, and evolution of our core infrastructure across platform engineering, data pipelines, billing systems, fleet management, and multi-cloud environments.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong leadership, strategic vision, and excellent communication skills. They run real work through agents (swarms, automation, loops) and lead their teams to do the same by owning the trust model for what agents can perform independently, what requires human guidance, and what guardrails apply.

This is not a purely managerial role: we need a leader who can set direction while remaining close to the technology, troubleshoot complex problems, participate in on-call rotations, and execute directly alongside the team.

We're particularly interested in candidates who have built and scaled infrastructure in a small, fast-moving company and who are comfortable balancing hands-on execution with technical leadership and team development.

What You'll Do

Define infrastructure strategy: Define infrastructure strategy and execution through the roadmap and standards, ensuring everything we run is reliable and scalable. Set priorities and weigh long-term work against operational needs, so systems scale with the needs of engineering and product.

Own platform infrastructure: Own macOS and Linux fleets, developer infrastructure, code review systems and provisioning, ensuring they are secure, reliable and cost-effective. Build automation and configuration management, run observability, and manage lifecycle management across every system, so these are platforms that engineers can rely on.

Run data and billing infrastructure: Run data pipelines and data engineering systems, ensuring reliability, scalability, correctness and operational resilience. Build and operate billing infrastructure, so business-critical workflows keep running.

Scale fleet management: Scale macOS and Linux fleet management, ensuring elastic capacity, efficient resource use and reliable operations. Plan and lead multi-cloud expansion, so infrastructure keeps up as demands grow.

Lead operational reliability: Lead reliability, performance and availability, and join on-call rotations alongside the team. Run incident response, troubleshoot complex issues and take direct ownership of critical problems, so production stays up.

Contribute hands-on technical depth: Contribute to architecture, implementation and debugging alongside the team. Drive operational improvements and mentor engineers, so the technical bar rises across the team.

Partner with engineering and product: Partner with engineering and product to communicate strategy, trade-offs, risks and progress, ensuring the message is clear. Shape infrastructure investments so they support the organization's goals and let teams move quickly.

Deliver elastic compute at scale: You make sure Expo always has the compute customers need across multiple clouds and regions, so builds, CI, and Simulators scale with demand. You keep cost per minute falling as volume grows, plan capacity ahead of launches and peak usage, and, starting next year, work with me (Joe) to find, evaluate, and build or acquire data center warehouses for our Mac and Linux fleet.

Clear communication from business needs to execution: You turn business needs, like a product launch, an enterprise deal, or a margin target, into concrete infrastructure plans that teams can execute. You name our gaps plainly, put realistic timelines on them, explain tradeoffs in cost, speed, and risk so executives, engineers, and customers can make good decisions, and update the company when something changes.

Velocity and security across every team: You build the platform, tooling, and paved paths that let product teams and agents ship faster without waiting on infrastructure, with security and reliability built in by default (isolation, access control, and incident response) so enterprise customers can trust Expo with their production apps. You measure velocity by how fast teams go from idea to production, and you find bottlenecks across teams and help remove them.

What You'll Bring

Low-level depth: Strong depth in at least one low-level area (OS, cloud or Kubernetes), and the ability to drop into any layer and fix it.

Hands-on leadership: A track record of leading infrastructure initiatives while remaining directly involved in execution (writing code, debugging systems, resolving operational challenges), not only delegating.

Fleet management: Strong experience managing and scaling Linux and macOS fleets, including provisioning, automation, configuration management, reliability and lifecycle operations.

Cloud infrastructure: Significant experience building scalable cloud infrastructure, including elastic capacity and resource utilization. Multiple cloud environments is a strong plus.

Developer infrastructure: Familiarity with developer infrastructure, code review systems and internal platforms that let engineering teams build and ship software efficiently.

Business-critical services: The ability to lead across data pipelines, billing systems and other business-critical services, with strong technical judgment across domains.

Incident management: Significant experience with on-call rotations, incident management, root-cause analysis, monitoring and improving the reliability of production systems.

Direction and communication: The ability to anticipate infrastructure needs, set a clear technical direction, prioritize, and communicate decisions and trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Builder mentality: Experience thriving in a lean, fast-moving environment where leaders balance strategic planning with direct technical execution and adapt to changing priorities.