Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations

Role Overview

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

We are looking for someone senior enough to set a 12–24 month architecture direction and hands‑on enough to be in the middle of all major IT decisions such as storage scaling, COLO expansion, uptime while managing all vendor negotiation. The ideal candidate will be productive on day one, at cohort scale. 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 audit.
• 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, IT scale problems and hard deadlines don't rattle you

• Engineering compute. Partner with engineering leadership to forecast and optimize infrastructure for compute‑intensive EDA workloads — RTL, verification, physical design, simulation, tape‑out. Manage Linux HPC environments, workload schedulers (LSF, Slurm, or equivalent), and large‑scale shared storage. Make sure infrastructure is ready ahead of design freezes and tape‑outs, silicon bring up, and customer SDK releases, not during them.
• Software infrastructure. Own CI/CD at scale, self‑hosted runners, and cross‑compilation and build farms across multiple target architectures; container and artifact registries, package and dependency mirroring, and reproducible build environments;
  Kubernetes for internal services and developer tooling; and source control that holds up at 200+ people, with large artifacts and deep submodule trees.
• Hybrid infrastructure. Architect and operate Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, on‑prem servers, virtualization, storage, backups, and both corporate and lab networks. Build the capacity‑planning discipline for compute, storage, bandwidth, licenses, and cloud resources — and make the build‑vs‑buy and cloud‑vs‑on‑prem calls.
• IP security. Stand up the program that protects RTL, physical‑design databases, foundry data, and customer information: IAM with SSO, MFA, RBAC and privileged‑access controls; endpoint security, DLP, encryption, vulnerability management; secure remote access; clear boundaries for employees, contractors, and partners. Lead us through customer security reviews and toward SOC 2 / ISO 27001 readiness — you own the outcome and decide the right mix of internal hires, MSPs, and specialist security firms to get there.
  
  Own the security controls around what we ship: open‑source license compliance and SBOM generation for anything we redistribute, code signing and artifact provenance for SDK and OTA payloads, and secure key handling for signed images.
• IT Infrastructure and facilities…