Senior Director, Network Development

Job Description

The Senior Director Network Development will lead engineering teams responsible for the operational excellence, reliability, and continuous improvement of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s global physical network. Reporting to the Vice President of Engineering, this leader will play a critical role in ensuring OCI’s datacenter and backbone networks operate at hyperscale with the resiliency, performance, security, and availability required by Oracle’s cloud customers.

This is a senior technology leadership role requiring deep physical networking expertise, strong operational judgment, hyperscale infrastructure experience, and the ability to lead globally distributed teams. The Senior Director will be responsible for driving network operations, production readiness, incident response, change management, observability, capacity health, lifecycle management, and continuous service improvement across OCI’s global network footprint.

The role spans physical network operations, backbone and transport reliability, interconnection readiness, hardware lifecycle execution, automation, monitoring, capacity planning, vendor coordination, and operational governance. This leader will work closely with Architecture, Product, Operations, SRE, Security, Data Center, Supply Chain, and executive stakeholders to ensure OCI delivers secure, reliable, high-performance connectivity for enterprise, AI, HPC, multicloud, and cloud-native workloads.

• Define and govern multi-year architecture and design standards across cloud, data center, WAN, and edge; ensure designs meet resilience, security, and compliance objectives.
• Sponsor transformational programs (e.g., SDN/intent-based networking, zero-trust segmentation) and enforce design reviews, configuration baselines, and lifecycle policies across regions.
• Establish enterprise validation strategy for new architectures, hardware/firmware, and software at scale; require pre-production proofs, pilot rollouts, and rollback plans.
• Align network roadmap with product and platform strategies; balance innovation with reliability, cost, and regulatory constraints.

• Set group strategy for network automation frameworks, pipelines, and “policy as code”; standardize reusable modules, guardrails, and CI/CD for network changes.
• Prioritize automation investments that reduce toil, increase change velocity, and improve MTTR; track benefits through measurable KPIs and error budget adherence.
• Ensure secure-by-design automation practices, including access controls, audit trails, and compliance checkpoints; drive adoption across all regions and teams in group.

• Own group wide test strategy and acceptance criteria for configurations, images, and changes; mandate automated regression, canary/blue-green rollouts, and production-safety checks.
• Institutionalize quality gates and change readiness reviews; ensure RCAs and corrective actions are systematically integrated into test plans and playbooks.
• Run governance forums to assess test coverage, defect escape, and reliability risk; direct group-wide Corrective and Preventive Actions priorities and timelines.

• Define network health strategy, SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets across services and regions; enforce consistent telemetry, alerting, and run‑book standards.
• Lead executive‑level incident management for high‑severity events; require consistent RCA quality, cross‑org learnings, and durable remediation at scale.
• Drive resiliency investments (e.g., redundancy, fault isolation, DR exercises); validate business continuity and recovery outcomes against policy and regulatory needs.

• Align network strategy with Cloud/Infra, SRE, Security, Product, and Finance; chair architecture and change boards to manage dependencies and risks.
• Build leadership capacity through coaching, succession planning, and inclusive practices; set clear expectations for managers and technical leaders across group.
• Own strategic vendor relationships and contract negotiations; drive joint roadmaps, performance SLAs,…