Director​/Fellow – Developer Productivity & Platform, ROCm

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THE ROLE:

ROCm is a 1,200-person engineering organization. The people in it are productive individually. The organization as a whole is not. Developers across firmware, kernel, build, and software teams encounter the same friction points — slow tool chains, fragmented workflows, bespoke local infrastructure assembled team-by-team to fill gaps nobody formally owns — and solve them independently, each time, in different ways. No one has owned this problem horizontally.

• The problem is real, the scope is rare
  — a horizontal mandate across a 1,200-person engineering organization, with a clear problem and leadership support to address it. Developer experience roles at this scope don't come up often.
• Build a function from scratch
  — you'll establish what developer productivity means at AMD, prove the model, and scale it. Budget exists to grow the team beneath you once the function is validated. This is a founding role, not a slot in an existing org chart.
• Direct line to leadership
  — you'll report directly to the head of the Developer Organization, with the access and visibility to move quickly and escape blockers without bureaucratic overhead.
• Direct impact on AMD's open-source velocity
  — ROCm is AMD's bet on the AI software ecosystem. Engineering time is the constraint. This role directly attacks that constraint.
• Breadth unusual for an IC
  — firmware, kernel, build, runtime, compiler, ML frameworks — this role touches all of it. If you want depth in one area, this isn't it. If you want horizontal breadth with genuine technical impact across a large, complex organization, it's a rare fit.

THE PERSON:

We're looking for a senior individual contributor to serve as the horizontal technical lead for developer productivity across the entire ROCm development organization. You'll sit in the Developer Organization (Dev Ops and QA), reporting directly to the head of that organization, but your mandate spans the full 1,200-person engineering body — surfacing the highest-friction points in the developer experience, and eliminating them: through infrastructure improvements, workflow redesign, or direct fixes to the development stack itself.

The goal is measurable, durable improvement in engineering velocity across the company — not for one team, for all of them.

This is a solo IC role to start. You'll build the function and prove the model. We have budget to hire supporting engineers beneath you as the work matures, but the first job is to establish what this function owns, what it can change, and what it's worth.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Own the developer productivity problem horizontally across ROCm
  — this is not a team-scoped role. You'll build a continuous, empirical view of where developers across the organization lose time: through direct interviews, instrumentation, friction logging, and analysis of build and CI data. This picture drives your roadmap.
• Identify and eliminate the highest-leverage friction points
  — once you can see where the time goes, you prioritize ruthlessly. Some fixes are infrastructure (build caching, environment provisioning, test selection); some are workflow changes (pre-submit gates, LKG baselines, CI reproduction paths); some are direct improvements to the development stack (compiler feedback, incremental build tuning, developer-facing tooling). You'll own and drive all three categories.
• Build shared tooling that replaces fragmentation
  — every ROCm component team has assembled workarounds for gaps nobody formally owns. Your job is to surface that work, identify what should become canonical, and drive consolidation into shared, maintained tooling — eliminating the incentive for…