Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations

Role Overview

Velaura AI is seeking an experienced Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations to own IT and infrastructure end to end: the hybrid compute environment our designers depend on, the security program that protects our design IP, the systems behind the hardware lab, and the team that runs all of it. You'll lead our existing IT team and grow it.

This is a build role, not a caretaking role. We need someone senior enough to set a 12–24 month architecture direction and hands-on enough to be in the middle of a storage decision, a scheduler-tuning problem, and a vendor negotiation in the same week. The ideal candidate will be productive on day one, at cohort scale, without IT becoming the bottleneck. Additionally they will:

• Ensure Compute and storage capacity is planned ahead of demand rather than in reaction to it; queue wait times and storage performance are measured and trending the right way.
• A new software engineer starts with repo access, a working build environment, and compute quota provisioned before they log in.
• IAM, endpoint, and access controls are in place and documented well enough to pass a customer security review.
• A disaster-recovery plan exists for every system a tape-out depends on, and it has been tested.
• Hands-on — you'd rather be inside the architecture and the troubleshooting than above it
• Scale-minded — you build for the company we're becoming, not the one we are today
• Engineering-oriented — you treat compute availability and storage performance as product-schedule items, because they are
• Security-conscious — you treat design data as the crown jewels and still find ways to say yes to engineers
• Pragmatic — you balance real controls against the speed a fast-growing company needs
• Steady — outages, security incidents, hiring waves, lab problems, and hard deadlines don't rattle you