DDN - 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.