Vice President, Production Engineering

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Vice President, Production Engineering based in United States.

This executive leadership role is responsible for the reliability, performance, scalability, and security of global, AI-first technology platforms. The Vice President, Production Engineering will own end-to-end production environments spanning cloud infrastructure, telecommunications, and data center platforms. The role will lead the transformation of a broad, operations-heavy organization into a modern, software-driven Production Engineering function. A key focus will be replacing reactive, ticket-based operations with automation, observability, resilient systems, and proactive reliability practices. The leader will influence architecture and engineering decisions while establishing production readiness and operational excellence as core disciplines. This is a high-impact opportunity to shape global engineering capabilities and enable platforms to operate reliably at significant scale.

Accountabilities:

• Lead the transformation of teams spanning software, systems, network, telecom, database, application operations, DevOps, SRE, and NOC functions into a unified Production Engineering organization.
• Shift operations from reactive, ticket-driven intervention toward automated, software-first systems designed for reliability, scalability, and proactive issue prevention.
• Define future-state organizational structures, roles, skills, career paths, and hiring strategies aligned with modern Production Engineering and AI-first platform requirements.
• Own the engineering and operation of global cloud infrastructure, telecommunications platforms, and data center environments, ensuring availability, performance, scalability, security, and cost targets are consistently achieved.
• Establish production readiness standards and operational governance covering capacity planning, resilience, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
• Embed Production Engineering as a core discipline alongside Product Engineering and promote infrastructure as code, automated recovery, synthetic testing, observability, and other software-driven operational practices.
• Establish reliability metrics, SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and observability strategies across monitoring, alerting, logs, metrics, tracing, and capacity management.
• Lead global incident management and executive-level response for major platform events, ensuring incidents result in systemic improvements rather than recurring failures or manual heroics.
• Drive AI-assisted operations, automation, and agent-based workflows to improve detection, diagnosis, remediation, capacity forecasting, and operational efficiency while maintaining appropriate human oversight.
• Own CI/CD, deployment automation, infrastructure-as-code, self-service platforms, and initiatives designed to reduce operational toil and manual intervention.
• Partner with Product Engineering, Customer Support, and Security to align platform capabilities with product commitments, customer feedback, and secure-by-design requirements.
• Serve as a senior operational leader during customer-impacting incidents and executive escalations.
• Lead and scale global Production Engineering teams, develop strong leadership layers, and cultivate a culture of ownership, operational excellence, continuous improvement, and decisive action.
• Attract, retain, and develop high-caliber engineering talent capable of operating AI-first platforms at global scale.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 15+ years of engineering leadership experience operating large-scale, distributed platforms.
• 8+ years leading senior engineering or operations organizations across infrastructure, platform, or production environments.
• Proven experience transforming organizational structures, capabilities, and skill sets within engineering or operations functions.
• Strong expertise in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, and runtime platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to establish engineering standards and influence architecture and technical decisions across complex organizations.
• Experience partnering effectively with Product, Security, and Support leadership in enterprise-scale environments.
• Strong executive leadership, organizational transformation, communication, and stakeholder management capabilities.
• Experience operating AI-enabled or data-intensive production platforms is preferred.
• Experience modernizing legacy operations or NOC-based organizations is preferred.
• Background leading Production Engineering or SRE organizations at scale is preferred.
• Experience operating within regulated, sovereign, or enterprise customer environments is a plus.

Benefits:

• Executive-level opportunity to shape a global Production Engineering organization and its technology strategy.
• Opportunity to lead the modernization of large-scale cloud, telecom, and data center environments.
• High-impact role focused on AI-first operations, automation, reliability, scalability, and platform engineering.
• Global leadership scope with the opportunity to develop and grow highly experienced engineering teams.
• Exposure to complex enterprise technology environments and large-scale distributed platforms.
• Opportunity to influence architecture, engineering standards, operational strategy, and long-term platform transformation.
• Comprehensive employment benefits and compensation package, as applicable to the role and location.