Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description:
The Director of IT Infrastructure Services leads the strategy, engineering, delivery, and operational excellence of the company’s core enterprise infrastructure services across Network Engineering, Cloud Platform Engineering, and Infrastructure Services. This role is responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency of the global technology foundation that enables business operations, engineering, enterprise applications, and mission-critical services.
This leader owns the operating model and technical roadmap for enterprise networking, cloud platforms, on-premises compute and storage, data center services, infrastructure automation, and cloud identity. Success in this role means resilient, performant, and secure services, predictable delivery, effective capacity and lifecycle management, strong operational discipline, and infrastructure platforms that can scale with the company’s rapid growth and evolving business requirements.
As a senior IT leader, the Director establishes architecture standards, service-management practices, operational metrics, and investment priorities across hybrid infrastructure environments. The ideal candidate brings deep technical and leadership experience in enterprise networking, cloud platforms, data center infrastructure, and DevOps practices, as well as a demonstrated ability to build and lead high-performing teams in security-conscious, high-growth environments.
The role has three direct-report organizations:
Network Engineering
Cloud Platform Engineering
IT Infrastructure Engineering
What you’ll do:
- Develop and execute the multi-year IT infrastructure strategy and roadmap across enterprise networking, cloud platforms, on-premises infrastructure, data centers, cloud identity, and infrastructure automation.
- Lead, mentor, and scale the Infrastructure Services leadership team.
- Establish a clear service delivery model, including service ownership, operational standards, escalation paths, on-call expectations, service-level objectives, capacity planning, lifecycle management, and performance metrics.
- Oversee Network Engineering, including enterprise routing and switching, wired and wireless connectivity, WAN, SD-WAN, Internet connectivity, VPN, client VPN, firewalls, network access control, segmentation, remote access, and network observability.
- Ensure network services are engineered and operated with high availability, strong security controls, resilient connectivity, documented standards, and appropriate support for corporate offices, data centers, remote users, cloud environments, and critical business applications.
- Lead Cloud Platform Engineering, including cloud architecture, platform management, cloud provisioning, IaC (Infrastructure as Code), DevOps enablement, cloud operations, cloud identity, cloud networking, monitoring, logging, resilience, and cost optimization.
- Define and govern standards for cloud landing zones, account or subscription structures, identity and access controls, infrastructure configuration, environment provisioning, tagging, backup, disaster recovery, logging, and policy enforcement.
- Drive infrastructure automation across cloud and on-premises environments through infrastructure as code, configuration management, CI/CD practices, self-service provisioning, orchestration, and standardized operational runbooks.
- Oversee Infrastructure Services, including on-premises compute, storage, virtualization, backup and recovery, hardware lifecycle management, data center operations, colocation services, and physical infrastructure planning.
- Establish capacity, availability, resiliency, and disaster-recovery strategies for critical infrastructure platforms, ensuring recovery objectives and operational procedures align with business and security requirements.
- Partner closely with Cybersecurity to embed security-by-design and least-privilege principles into network, cloud, identity, and infrastructure architectures, including segmentation, privileged access controls, logging, vulnerability remediation, secure configuration baselines, and incident response readiness.
- Partner with Enterprise Applications, Data, Engineering, End User Computing, Facilities, Finance, Procurement, and business stakeholders to align infrastructure capabilities with enterprise priorities, application requirements, growth plans, and site expansion needs.
- Lead infrastructure incident management and executive communications for significant service disruptions, ensuring rapid restoration, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and measurable improvements to operational resilience.
- Establish and monitor operational KPIs and executive reporting for infrastructure availability, performance, service health, capacity, delivery velocity, cloud spend, operational risk, security posture, and modernization progress.
- Own infrastructure financial planning, including budget development, forecasting, vendor negotiations, licensing, cloud consumption, hardware refresh cycles, managed-service costs, and cost-optimization initiatives.
- Develop strategic relationships with cloud providers, telecommunications carriers, hardware and software vendors, managed service providers, and implementation partners to improve service quality, reduce risk, and optimize total cost of ownership.
- Define and maintain infrastructure architecture principles, technical standards, reference designs, documentation requirements, and lifecycle roadmaps.
- Build a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, automation, documentation, operational rigor, and customer-focused service delivery across the Infrastructure Services organization.
Required qualifications:
- 12+ years of progressive experience in enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud platforms, networking, systems engineering, or related technical disciplines.
- 5+ years of leadership experience managing managers and leading multi-functional infrastructure, cloud, and network engineering organizations.
- Demonstrated experience developing and executing enterprise infrastructure strategies across hybrid cloud, network, data center, and core platform services.
- Deep expertise in enterprise network architecture and operations, including routing, switching, WAN, VPN, firewalls, network segmentation, network access control, remote access, and network monitoring.
- Strong experience designing, operating, and governing cloud platforms, including cloud architecture, identity, networking, provisioning, observability, cost management, resiliency, and operational controls.
- Experience leading DevOps and infrastructure automation initiatives using infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, CI/CD pipelines, automated provisioning, and standardized platform services.
- Strong background in on-premises infrastructure, including compute, storage, virtualization, backup and recovery, data center or colocation operations, and hardware lifecycle management.
- Proven experience establishing service-management practices, including incident management, problem management, change management, service-level objectives, operational dashboards, and root-cause analysis.
- Experience implementing high-availability, business continuity, and disaster-recovery capabilities for critical technology platforms.
- Demonstrated ability to partner effectively with Cybersecurity on identity, network security, cloud security, logging, vulnerability remediation, privileged access, and security architecture requirements.
- Strong financial acumen and experience managing infrastructure budgets, cloud consumption, vendor contracts, telecommunications spend, licensing, and capital or operating expense planning.
- Strong executive communication skills, including the ability to translate complex technical risks, tradeoffs, investment needs, and operational performance into clear business-oriented recommendations.
- Experience participating in or leading high-severity incident response, executive escalation management, and post-incident improvement programs.
Preferred qualifications:
- 15+ years of progressive IT infrastructure experience, including 7+ years leading large-scale, multi-disciplinary infrastructure organizations.
- Experience building and scaling infrastructure services in a high-growth, geographically distributed, or rapidly evolving enterprise environment.
- Experience supporting regulated, security-sensitive, or compliance-driven environments with rigorous requirements for access control, segmentation, auditability, resiliency, and secure operations.
- Experience operating infrastructure within Microsoft Azure, AWS, or multi-cloud environments, including enterprise identity integration and cloud governance.
- Experience with modern network architectures, including SD-WAN, zero-trust network access, secure remote access, network segmentation, SASE, and cloud-native networking.
- Experience with infrastructure observability platforms, AIOps, capacity analytics, service health dashboards, and automated remediation.
- Strong background in ITIL-based service management, operational maturity models, and KPI-driven continuous improvement.
- Experience with merger, acquisition, office expansion, data-center migration, cloud migration, or enterprise-scale infrastructure modernization programs.
- Relevant technical or leadership certifications, such as CISSP, CCNP/CCIE, JNCIP/JNCIE, AWS or Azure architecture certifications, ITIL, PMP, or equivalent experience.
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Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.