DDN—Senior Director, Data Platform Services

Job description

Description: KEY RESPONSIBILITIES Organizational & People Leadership - Own the leadership, structure, and outcome of multiple engineering teams delivering Infinia S3, POSIX, and NFS offerings, with teams located in India and internationally. - Build and scale an agile, high-performing engineering organization: strong technical bar, high accountability, and a culture where teams take genuine ownership of what they ship. - Recruit, develop, and retain strong engineering managers and engineers; build a durable leadership bench across all sites. - Set clear expectations, give direct feedback, and run rigorous, fair performance and career development processes for the org. - Foster a collaborative, inclusive culture across a geographically distributed team, ensuring engineers everywhere feel equally informed, included, and empowered. - Champion developer experience across the organization: streamlined onboarding, clear documentation, and low-friction tooling, so engineers at every site can ramp quickly and stay productive. End-to-End Execution & Delivery Ownership - Own execution end to end for the S3, POSIX, and NFS offerings, from planning and prioritization through delivery, quality, and production readiness. - Define and continuously improve the engineering processes, release practices, and quality gates that let distributed teams ship enterprise-grade software predictably. - Track delivery against commitments; proactively surface risks, trade-offs, and blockers to stakeholders and drive them to resolution. - Ensure consistent engineering standards and practices across all teams and locations, so quality and velocity don't vary by geography. - Drive adoption of modern engineering practices and AI-assisted development tools as a standard part of how the organization works. - Continuously invest in engineering productivity: build systems, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tooling, to reduce cycle time and maximize the org's shipping velocity. Technical Leadership - Bring a strong technical grounding in data platforms and storage systems to engage credibly in architecture, design, and technical trade-off discussions. - Partner with architects and senior engineers to ensure technical decisions support scalability, reliability, and performance at enterprise scale. - Balance short-term delivery pressure against long-term technical health, ensuring the teams invest appropriately in maintainability and technical debt. - Embed quality as a first-class engineering discipline: testing, observability, and reliability practices built into the development lifecycle rather than bolted on at the end. Cross-Timezone & Cross-Functional Collaboration - Work effectively across multiple time zones, with particular emphasis on close, sustained collaboration with executive stakeholders based in the US. - Represent the S3, POSIX, and NFS organization in planning and leadership forums; communicate status, priorities, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and executive audiences. - Partner closely with Product Management, Architecture, QA, and Solutions teams to align roadmaps and priorities with customer and business needs. - Coordinate dependencies with peer engineering leaders across DDN's broader platform to keep cross-team initiatives on track. - Keep customer experience front and center in engineering decisions, partnering with Support and Solutions to ensure the S3, POSIX, and NFS offerings meet real-world reliability, performance, and usability expectations. REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. - 15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial work on data platforms, storage systems, or distributed infrastructure at enterprise scale. - 8+ years of experience leading engineering managers and multi-team organizations, including teams distributed across multiple countries or regions. - Demonstrated experience building agile, effective engineering teams and organizations from the ground up or through significant scaling. - Proven ownership of end-to-end execution for complex software offerings, from planning through production delivery and support. - Strong technical background in storage and data platforms, sufficient to engage meaningfully in architecture and design discussions and earn the credibility of senior engineers. - Track record of working effectively across time zones and geographies, with proven success partnering closely with US-based executive stakeholders. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to translate technical detail into clear guidance for executive audiences. PREFERRED SKILLS - Direct experience with storage protocol engineering. - Prior experience leading engineering organizations that span both India-based and international sites. - Experience standing up or scaling an engineering site or hub in India for a global organization. - Familiarity with enterprise on-premises software release cycles, including release management, customer validation, and GA processes. - Experience driving the adoption of AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering workflows across a large organization. - Track record of instilling engineering best practices: code review standards, test automation, and CI/CD discipline, across distributed teams.