About The Role
Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for frontier AI customers. The software that turns racks of GPUs into a usable platform is its own product, and it is the one you will own.
You will build and run the organization behind Volta's platform: the multi-tenant IaaS, the software that provisions and manages the bare metal beneath it, the network fabric integration, and over time the higher-level services that sit on top of an AI factory. You set the strategic direction for all of it under high-level guidance from the CTO, and you build the organization that delivers it.
This is a building role, not a caretaking one. You inherit a strong early engineering presence, including a principal engineer leading the first US team and engineers in Europe who will move into a local structure under a Director, Platform Engineering, EMEA acting as your deputy. That role is not yet filled, and you will hire it.
You report to the CTO, sit alongside Volta's other functional leaders, and partner closely with the CPO on product direction without sitting inside that reporting line. It is a software leadership role, but not an abstracted one. Our platform sits directly on GPU hardware, high-performance fabric, and physical sites, and it only works if it stays coherent with them.
What You Own
The platform. The multi-tenant IaaS and bare metal management stacks, the network fabric integration and the software that programs it, the customer-facing console and APIs, the operational and analytics tooling above the data center layer, the build-versus-buy calls, and the architecture that keeps all of it coherent as Volta scales.
The organization. Headcount and budget, the leadership structure beneath you, the hiring bar, and the health and retention of an organization growing toward 50-plus engineers across two continents.
Delivery and reliability. The platform meeting its commitments to internal and customer-facing stakeholders, at the operational quality frontier AI deployments demand.
The interfaces. Clean, well-understood boundaries with the project delivery and infrastructure engineering functions, the CDO's organization, security engineering, and product.
Why this Role
Volta is early enough that the decisions this person makes will define how the platform gets built for years, and late enough that the customers are real and the deadlines are contractual. If building and leading the software organization behind some of the largest AI deployments in the world is the right problem, we would like to talk.
What You Will Be Doing
Strategy and Direction
Own the strategy for Volta's platform software: where the IaaS, bare metal management, and network platform layers go, what we build versus buy, and how the platform evolves as the business scales.
Translate the product roadmap owned by the CPO into a concrete platform roadmap, in strategic alignment with the CTO, and own execution against it.
Make the architectural calls that keep the platform coherent as scope and headcount grow.
Building the Organization
Grow platform engineering toward 50-plus engineers across the US and EU, deliberately and without lowering the hiring bar.
Structure the organization as capability teams that own defined parts of the stack, including compute, storage, control plane and APIs, confidential computing, networking, and the customer-facing surface.
Build the leadership layer beneath you: team leads, the Director for EMEA as your deputy, and the management bench that lets you stop being the escalation point for everything.
Own hiring: define requirements, raise the bar, and close strong candidates.
Technical Leadership
Stay close enough to the technology to lead architecture and design reviews, drive the hard technical debates, and call the right answer when it matters.
Own the boundary between the platform software and the hardware, fabric, and site layers beneath it, so nothing breaks between the cloud abstraction and what it runs on.
Own reliability as a function, not a team virtue: on-call practice, incident response, and the structural fixes that follow.
Take the early-stage stacks forward and reshape them as needed. Current technology choices are a starting point you are free to evolve, not a constraint you inherit.
Working Across Volta
Be a trusted engineering partner to the CPO and the product organization, aligned on platform direction without that partnership running through a reporting line.
Keep tight boundaries with the project delivery and infrastructure engineering functions, particularly at the seam where a deployment hands over into the long-lived platform.
Work with security engineering across the development lifecycle so security is built into the platform rather than added afterwards. Our customer contracts carry compliance obligations, and the platform has to be able to evidence them.
Represent the platform at the executive level, and be credible in front of frontier AI customers when the moment calls for it.
What You Bring
Track record building and scaling a software engineering organization at VP or equivalent level, from a small team toward 50-plus people, including the org design, hiring, and a layer of managers and leads reporting into you.
Executive engineering leadership where you set direction and own outcomes across a function, not pure people management. You are still credible in a design review.
Demonstrable understanding of what sits under a cloud service: virtualization, storage, networking, multi-tenancy, and the bare metal layer beneath them. You do not need to have run an IaaS business, but you need to know how one works.
Enough working knowledge of the hardware to keep the layers from breaking against each other and to reason about where software meets GPU, fabric, and storage reality. Not a hardware specialist, but not abstracted away from it either.
Experience owning and evolving existing production systems, not only greenfield builds.
Experience leading a distributed organization across regions and time zones, including through a deputy rather than directly.
The maturity to take high-level direction and turn it into strategy and execution without needing the details handed to you.
Judgment to work across organizational boundaries with peer engineering and infrastructure leaders, defining clean seams rather than fighting over them.
Comfortable with full-time on-site presence in Palo Alto and travel across a US and EU organization.
Nice to Have (But Not Essential)
Direct experience with an IaaS or cloud platform, built or operated at scale.
Background at a neocloud, hyperscaler, GPU cloud, or HPC environment where the software platform was the product.
Familiarity with our current stack: KVM and QEMU, Ceph and SPDK, BGP and VXLAN, Kubernetes operators, PXE and Flatcar provisioning, and Go, Python, and Rust. This is where the platform is today, not a constraint on where it goes.
Experience integrating or leveling up an inherited or acquired engineering team.
Experience where software and physical infrastructure teams had to stay tightly aligned, and where the software could not paper over the hardware.
Exposure to building higher-level services on top of an infrastructure platform.
Experience leading an organization under ISO 27001 or SOC 2 obligations, with the evidence built into engineering practice rather than around it.
A view on how AI-assisted development changes engineering throughput, and experience scaling that across an organization rather than leaving it to individuals.