Director, Production and Infrastructure Engineering

About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

About Trase

Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig, Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security.

About the Role

We are seeking an Engineering Leader to build and lead our Production and Infrastructure Engineering organization. You will manage engineers across DevOps, SRE, DevEx, MLOps, and lead a dedicated support team. You will be accountable for team performance, development, and delivery across these functions.

You will bring a strong foundation in infrastructure and software engineering and stay close enough to the work to challenge assumptions, guide technical decisions, and help engineers resolve difficult problems. Your hands-on involvement will focus on design and code reviews, technical investigation, and pairing when needed, while developing technical leads and delegating implementation to the team.

This role calls for a nimble, adaptable leader who can organize ambiguous work, adjust plans as priorities change, and bring different technical disciplines together around clear outcomes. You will create focus, make timely decisions, and build a team that delivers consistently.

Responsibilities

• Build and Develop the Team: Own hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, career development, and performance management. Coach junior engineers, develop technical leads, and give senior specialists clear expectations and candid feedback. Build the skills and ownership needed for the team to operate effectively.

• Lead Across Technical Disciplines: Set shared priorities and clear responsibilities across infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, testing, and application delivery. Delegate technical execution to the appropriate leads, resolve disagreements, and hold engineers at every level accountable to agreed decisions and commitments.

• Own Planning and Delivery: Lead sprint planning, backlog grooming, capacity planning, and delivery reviews in partnership with technical leads and TPMs. Turn ambiguous goals into actionable work, manage dependencies and scope, and balance roadmap delivery with incidents and customer support. Replan quickly and communicate tradeoffs when conditions change.

• Provide Hands-On Technical Leadership: Participate in design and code reviews, ask informed questions, and join investigations or pairing sessions when the team is blocked. Use your infrastructure and software background to connect application behavior with deployment and operational concerns and guide practical solutions.

• Lead Production and Release Readiness: Make reliability, release and change management, QA, and E2E validation part of the team's delivery process. Assign accountable owners, establish readiness criteria with feature teams, and ensure testing, operational documentation, and rollback plans support release decisions.

• Strengthen Operations and Developer Experience: Lead the team's improvements to cloud infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, observability, on-call readiness, and incident response. Prioritize work that reduces recurring incidents and developer friction. Use delivery, reliability, recovery, and support metrics to assess results and guide investment.

• Lead Dedicated Red Cell Partners Support: Manage a cross-functional team of full-stack engineers, DevOps engineers, and a dedicated TPM. Align priorities, staffing, delivery commitments, and support expectations with stakeholders. Resolve dependencies across application and infrastructure teams and maintain clear escalation paths.

• Partner Across the Organization: Work with Product, Platform, Applied AI, and Security/GRC on delivery priorities, operational readiness, and applicable customer requirements. Surface risks early, secure decisions when needed, and ensure follow-through on engineering commitments.

Requirements

• Engineering People Leadership: 10+ years of relevant engineering…