Senior Director, Data Platform Services
DDN · Pune
Key Responsibilities
Organizational & People Leadership
Own the leadership, structure, and outcome of multiple engineering teams delivering Infinia S3, POSIX, and NFS offerings, with teams located in India and internationally.
Build and scale an agile, high-performing engineering organization: strong technical bar, high accountability, and a culture where teams take genuine ownership of what they ship.
Recruit, develop, and retain strong engineering managers and engineers; build a durable leadership bench across all sites.
Set clear expectations, give direct feedback, and run rigorous, fair performance and career development processes for the org.
Foster a collaborative, inclusive culture across a geographically distributed team, ensuring engineers everywhere feel equally informed, included, and empowered.
Champion developer experience across the organization: streamlined onboarding, clear documentation, and low-friction tooling, so engineers at every site can ramp quickly and stay productive.
End-to-End Execution & Delivery Ownership
Own execution end to end for the S3, POSIX, and NFS offerings, from planning and prioritization through delivery, quality, and production readiness.
Define and continuously improve the engineering processes, release practices, and quality gates that let distributed teams ship enterprise-grade software predictably.
Track delivery against commitments; proactively surface risks, trade-offs, and blockers to stakeholders and drive them to resolution.
Ensure consistent engineering standards and practices across all teams and locations, so quality and velocity don't vary by geography.
Drive adoption of modern engineering practices and AI-assisted development tools as a standard part of how the organization works.
Continuously invest in engineering productivity: build systems, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tooling, to reduce cycle time and maximize the org's shipping velocity.
Technical Leadership
Bring a strong technical grounding in data platforms and storage systems to engage credibly in architecture, design, and technical trade-off discussions.
Partner with architects and senior engineers to ensure technical decisions support scalability, reliability, and performance at enterprise scale.
Balance short-term delivery pressure against long-term technical health, ensuring the teams invest appropriately in maintainability and technical debt.
Embed quality as a first-class engineering discipline: testing, observability, and reliability practices built into the development lifecycle rather than bolted on at the end.
Cross-Timezone & Cross-Functional Collaboration
Work effectively across multiple time zones, with particular emphasis on close, sustained collaboration with executive stakeholders based in the US.
Represent the S3, POSIX, and NFS organization in planning and leadership forums; communicate status, priorities, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and executive audiences.
Partner closely with Product Management, Architecture, QA, and Solutions teams to align roadmaps and priorities with customer and business needs.
Coordinate dependencies with peer engineering leaders across DDN's broader platform to keep cross-team initiatives on track.
Keep customer experience front and center in engineering decisions, partnering with Support and Solutions to ensure the S3, POSIX, and NFS offerings meet real-world reliability, performance, and usability expectations.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
15+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial work on data platforms, storage systems, or distributed infrastructure at enterprise scale.
8+ years of experience leading engineering managers and multi-team organizations, including teams distributed across multiple countries or regions.
Demonstrated experience building agile, effective engineering teams and organizations from the ground up or through significant scaling.
Proven ownership of end-to-end execution for complex software offerings, from planning through production delivery and support.
Strong technical background in storage and data platforms, sufficient to engage meaningfully in architecture and design discussions and earn the credibility of senior engineers.
Track record of working effectively across time zones and geographies, with proven success partnering closely with US-based executive stakeholders.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to translate technical detail into clear guidance for executive audiences.
Preferred Skills
Direct experience with storage protocol engineering.
Prior experience leading engineering organizations that span both India-based and international sites.
Experience standing up or scaling an engineering site or hub in India for a global organization.
Familiarity with enterprise on-premises software release cycles, including release management, customer validation, and GA processes.
Experience driving the adoption of AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering workflows across a large organization.
Track record of instilling engineering best practices: code review standards, test automation, and CI/CD discipline, across distributed teams.