Director of Engineering, Cloud
OVERVIEW
As a cloud-native startup, Instacart has scaled its engineering organization to meet the demand created by finding product-market fit. This scale has created the need for a Cloud Engineering team to reduce the cost of Service Ownership. This team creates platforms and tools that simplify a development team’s interaction with cloud services and defines the underlying architecture to support reliably deploying and scaling our software around the globe. The elements of Cloud Engineering are Platform, Release, Traffic, and Economics. Infrastructure as code drives automation that can provision infrastructure in multiple environments or regions. Release engineering manages our Continuous Delivery platform and the interface for teams to operate their software in production. Traffic defines our networking strategy and ensures communication is secure, consistent, and resilient. Economics helps teams manage efficiency and capacity planning.
The challenge of Cloud Engineering is balancing investment in behind the scenes architecture and customer-facing tooling. Too much emphasis on architecture results in a lack of customer focus and ivory tower solutions. Too much emphasis on servicing customer requests results in endless toil and a lack of stability. The Director of Cloud Engineering is responsible for maintaining this balance. A successful Director drives measurable outcomes with their strategy and maintains a metrics and customer-focused approach towards decision making.
ABOUT THE JOB
- Recruit and organize a team of world-class managers and engineers aligned on a vision of reducing the cost of service ownership
- Establish our compute platform strategy
- Define our platform strategy for abstracting cloud services to a convenient API for developer teams
- Owning our Continuous Delivery pipeline supporting release semantics like canaries, blue-green and percentage-based rollouts
- Lead the creation of standardized development environment strategy
- Partner with Quality on Test Infrastructure, Continuous Integration and Staging environment strategies
- Deliver self-service tooling for service owners to operate their software in production
- Establishing communication pathways that notify teams of required maintenance, upgrade, or Compliance activity.
- Own our networking strategy spanning account topography, segmentation, SSL, DNS, load balancing, service mesh, and CDN.
- Own our relationships with cloud providers
- Develop capacity and cost planning strategies that help teams understand what they are using and supporting dev team decision making
ABOUT YOU
- You have led Infrastructure or Cloud engineering teams responsible for providing service to the rest of engineering in front of AWS
- You can recruit, hire, and build a team. You can define an organization and hiring strategy and close top talent because people want to work for YOU.
- You are comfortable working directly with stakeholders across Engineering to understand what needs to be built to support them.
- You have an opinion on how Infrastructure can adapt to a more Product-oriented execution strategy and can limit interrupts with a strong vision
- 5-10 years of people management experience