Director, Production and Infrastructure Engineering

About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

About Trase

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.

If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!

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

#LI-RCP 

Our Red Cell Partners Benefits (may differ for each incubation):

For full-time roles

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as 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. 
  
• Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux. 

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.

Applicant Data Disclosure   

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC ("Red Cell") uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:  

• Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process; 

• Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases; 
• Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories. 

Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact talent@redcellpartners.com.  

Red Cell requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Red Cell's data retention policies.

For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and Applicant Privacy Notice.