Senior Director - Data Platform Services

About the job:

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.