Director of Infrastructure Engineering

What you’ll do:

Blackbird.AI helps organizations discover emergent threats and stay one step ahead of real-world harm through our AI-powered Narrative and Risk Intelligence Platform. Our commitment is to prioritize safety and security, providing the tools to identify potential risks and ensure a safer environment proactively. No matter the job or where it’s located, we’re all connected by a shared vision: To lead and enhance the landscape of risk intelligence. 

Reporting to the Head of Engineering, the Director of Infrastructure Engineering will be the visionary leader responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the infrastructure architecture for our real-time streaming cloud-hosted analytics platform. This role will be a heavy hands on technical role to begin with and pivotal in establishing a robust foundation for deploying various microservices, databases, and frameworks, along with performance monitoring tools and continuous integration and deployment pipelines. As you build the team, you will start managing your time between infrastructure leadership and hands on responsibilities.

As the Director of Infrastructure Engineering, you’ll have the opportunity to drive and manage:

• Infrastructure Leadership: Own the strategic vision for infrastructure architecture, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security across all deployments.
• Platform Management: Oversee the architecture and performance of Linux servers, service orchestrators, and containers.
• Performance Optimization: Engineer fault tolerance mechanisms, backup procedures, data retention policies, and help optimize essential components
• Security Collaboration: Uphold rigorous security standards, conduct security audits, manage TLS, firewalls, and ensure “security by design- built in, not bolted on” in all infrastructure components in collaboration with the application security team and our CISO.
• Automation & Deployment: Develop and maintain deployment and rollout scripts for seamless and efficient processes including efficient code reuse, ensuring cloud-neutral deployments adaptable to AWS or on-premise environments.
• Collaboration: Work closely with other engineering, AI and security teams to maintain best practices in stack selection and deployment, following DevSecOps practices and fostering a collaborative environment.
• Monitoring & Scaling: Develop comprehensive monitoring and telemetry solutions to ensure system observability/telemetry, security, and manage the scaling of various databases to optimize performance.
• Innovation: Drive continuous improvement and innovation within the infrastructure team, staying current with the latest advancements in technology and best practices.

What you’ll bring: 

• 10+ years of overall Infrastructure engineering experience.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor a team, drive strategic initiatives, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and multi-task very well.
• Soft Skills: Excellent communication, problem-solving, and project management skills, with a proactive and innovative player/coach mindset.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Proven track record of successfully deploying cloud and SaaS products with a focus on horizontal scalability and distribution.
• Proven track record of migrating complex infrastructure to code with frameworks, like Pulumi.
• Expert-level proficiency in Linux systems.
• Mastery of Kubernetes (including Helm) and Docker containers.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Extensive experience with infrastructure security, network infrastructure, and monitoring and observability tools.
• Experience in managing secret stores, like AWS Secrets Manager.
• Expertise in building automation, CI/CD tools, and cloud services similar to AWS S3, CloudFront, and Route53.
  

Helpful to have:

• Experience with MLOps frameworks (e.g., Kubeflow, MLFlow).
• Technical background or experience in AI/ML deployments.
• Experience with multi-tenant deployments in AWS or similar environments.
• Familiarity with compliance certifications such as SOC 2 and FedRAMP.
• Knowledge of mainstream Data Engineering tools (e.g., Airflow, Databricks, ElasticSearch).
• Experience handling large datasets (terabytes scale).

We’ve outlined specific skills, experience, and requirements for this position, but don’t stress if you don’t meet every single one. Our Talent Team is dedicated to discovering exceptional individuals, and they might identify a relevant aspect of your background that suits this role or another opportunity within Blackbird.AI.

If you have passion for the role, please still apply.

What’s in it for you:

Blackbird.AI is embarking on an exciting growth journey with numerous opportunities for career development within the company. You will join a nurturing, inclusive, and experienced team. 

Join us as we soar to new heights!

Values:

At Blackbird.AI, our core values shape how we work and make decisions. Our values inspire us to be authentic and continue improving. 

We embrace a strong sense of responsibility to society, recognizing the vital role our services play in empowering governments, communities, and individuals to foster critical thinking and empowerment. We believe in integrating personal and professional lives with societal needs, emphasizing the importance of creating an environment that attracts top talent and provides substantial growth opportunities. We are motivated by the potential of science and technology to impact humanity positively.