Director, HPC Systems Software Engineering
Nscale · Houston, New York City, San Francisco · $230,000–$343,333 (stated in the posting)
About the Role (Job Purpose)
The Director, HPC Systems Engineering is accountable for the strategy, execution, and organisational effectiveness of Nscale’s HPC systems engineering function. This role operates at organisation scope and is responsible for ensuring that teams deliver reliable, scalable, and supportable HPC platform capabilities aligned with business priorities and long-term platform strategy.
This role combines organisational leadership with strong technical and operational judgement. You will shape the strategy for a major HPC platform area, build and lead the teams responsible for delivering it, and ensure that architecture, execution, and service quality remain aligned as the organisation grows.
As a Director, your impact comes through leadership of managers, senior engineers, and team-of-teams structures. You are accountable for building a healthy, high-performing organisation with the right structure, talent, operating model, and priorities to package and operate high-quality HPC systems as services.
What You’ll be Doing (Responsibilities)
Strategy, Scope & Organisational Direction
- Define and evolve the strategy for a major HPC systems engineering area, aligned with business goals, customer needs, platform priorities, and long-term service direction
- Translate company and engineering strategy into clear priorities, investment areas, and execution plans for the organisation
- Ensure HPC platform architecture, operational maturity, and delivery priorities remain aligned across teams
- Partner with Principal and Senior Staff engineers to ensure technical strategy is coherent, actionable, and executed effectively
- Balance short-term delivery pressure against long-term platform health, team sustainability, and organisational capability
Organisation Leadership & Execution
- Lead a major HPC systems engineering organisation through managers, senior technical leaders, and team-of-teams structures
- Own delivery outcomes, execution quality, service quality, and team health across the area
- Shape team topology, ownership boundaries, support models, and operating mechanisms to support effective execution at scale
- Establish the right planning, prioritisation, review, and escalation mechanisms to keep the organisation effective and accountable
- Remove systemic blockers that reduce engineering effectiveness or create avoidable delivery or operational risk
Technical Oversight & Platform Quality
- Maintain sufficient technical depth to challenge designs, evaluate trade-offs, and support strong engineering judgement across the organisation
- Ensure teams are building on sound software, systems, and operational foundations for Slurm-based and adjacent HPC services
- Sponsor major cross-team HPC platform initiatives that require coordination, investment, or organisational change
- Ensure reliability, performance, supportability, and operational maturity are treated as first-class requirements
- Build a strong partnership model with adjacent cloud-native software engineering teams so shared patterns are reused effectively
People, Capability & Leadership Development
- Hire, develop, and retain strong engineering leaders, managers, and senior HPC systems engineers
- Raise the leadership bar through coaching, feedback, succession planning, and strong performance management
- Build a healthy partnership model between engineering managers and senior ICs
- Strengthen organisational capability over time by addressing skill gaps, clarifying expectations, and improving how the organisation operates
- Foster a culture of ownership, clarity, urgency, strong engineering standards, and calm operational leadership
Cross-Functional & External Leadership
- Serve as a trusted partner to senior engineering, product, infrastructure, security, and business stakeholders
- Represent the organisation in strategic planning, executive discussions, architecture reviews, customer conversations, and partner discussions where needed
- Own budget, headcount planning, and organisational investment decisions for the area
- Ensure the HPC systems engineering organisation is positioned to support broader company goals and changing business needs
- Where relevant, support Nscale’s technical position in the broader HPC and cloud-native ecosystem
About You (Skills / Qualifications)
- Proven experience leading a significant HPC systems, platform engineering, or infrastructure-heavy engineering organisation
- Strong technical credibility in software engineering for HPC systems, distributed infrastructure, Linux-based platforms, and production operations
- Demonstrated ability to operate at org scope, translating business and engineering strategy into team structure, priorities, and execution
- Strong track record of leading through managers and senior technical leaders rather than relying primarily on individual contribution
- Experience building high-performing engineering organisations, including hiring, leadership development, organisation design, and performance management
- Strong judgement in balancing execution, platform quality, operational risk, technical quality, and long-term investment
- Experience working closely with senior ICs to turn HPC platform strategy into practical delivery outcomes
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to explain priorities, trade-offs, and constraints clearly to senior leadership
- Experience owning budget, headcount, and planning decisions for a meaningful engineering area
- Strong understanding of GPU infrastructure, HPC scheduler environments, networking constraints, and production service maturity
- Experience with Slurm is strongly preferred; experience with Kueue or other batch scheduling technologies is valuable
The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.