Data Center Operations and Maintenance Engineering Leader

DATA CENTER OPERATIONS AND MAINTENANCE LEADER Location: Hybrid | Bellevue, WA Area Titles: Manager, Director, Senior Director, VP (multiple roles available) LEAD THE OPERATIONS ORGANIZATION BEHIND NEXT-GENERATION AI INFRASTRUCTURE ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY A well-funded, rapidly growing AI infrastructure company is building a next-generation cloud platform designed to power the full lifecycle of artificial intelligence. The organization is developing a comprehensive AI infrastructure, platform, and services portfolio that supports the full spectrum of AI workloads—including large-scale compute, model training, fine-tuning, inference, and emerging agentic AI applications. Backed by significant long-term investment, the company combines the speed, ownership, and innovation of a startup with the stability and resources of an established parent organization. Engineering teams are intentionally lean, highly collaborative, and AI-native, leveraging automation and modern tooling to operate world-class infrastructure at scale. As AI data centers come online across North America, the company is building its Operations & Maintenance leadership organization. We're seeking experienced operational leaders who have built and scaled production infrastructure organizations and can establish the people, processes, tooling, and operational discipline required to deliver exceptional reliability and customer experience. THE OPPORTUNITY This is a leadership role responsible for building and scaling the Operations & Maintenance function supporting mission-critical AI infrastructure. Depending on experience, responsibilities may range from leading a regional operations team to defining the long-term operational strategy across multiple facilities. You will partner closely with Engineering, Infrastructure, Networking, Hardware, and Customer Operations leadership to create a highly reliable, scalable operating model capable of supporting one of the industry's most advanced AI infrastructure platforms. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build, lead, mentor, and grow high-performing Operations & Maintenance teams. - Develop the operational strategy, organizational structure, and execution model supporting large-scale AI infrastructure. - Establish world-class operational processes, including incident response, change management, problem management, and service reliability. - Lead major incident management efforts and executive communications during production events. - Drive operational excellence through proactive monitoring, observability, automation, and continuous improvement initiatives. - Partner with Engineering to ensure operational readiness for new infrastructure deployments and platform launches. - Define service level objectives (SLOs), operational KPIs, and reliability metrics across the infrastructure portfolio. - Build scalable on-call programs, escalation models, runbooks, and operational governance. - Champion root cause analysis and long-term corrective actions to improve platform resilience. - Influence infrastructure architecture and operational tooling to improve availability, efficiency, and customer experience. - Help shape the long-term operations organization as the company expands globally. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Experience leading Operations, Site Reliability, Infrastructure Operations, Data Center Operations, or Production Engineering organizations. - Proven success building or scaling operations teams within cloud infrastructure, hyperscale environments, AI infrastructure, or large distributed systems. - Deep expertise in production operations, incident management, service reliability, and operational excellence. - Experience leading cross-functional teams during high-severity production incidents. - Strong understanding of infrastructure operations across compute, networking, storage, and hardware environments. - Demonstrated success building operational processes, organizational structure, and scalable support models in high-growth environme…