Senior Director of DevOps & Developer Productivity, Sonatus
$238-325k
+ Equity program
3 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)
Cloud-based solutions for software-defined vehicles
Open for applications
Cloud-based solutions for software-defined vehicles
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$238-325k
+ Equity program
3 days a week in office (Sunnyvale, CA)
101-200 employees
Company mission
To accelerate automotive innovation
Role
Who you are
- Developer DNA is Mandatory: You must have prior professional experience working as an application developer before moving into DevOps/SRE leadership. You understand the software development lifecycle (SDLC) from the inside out
- Enterprise Experience: You have significant experience working in large, mature engineering organizations (e.g., supporting hundreds of developers) and know what necessary governance looks like at scale
- Master Negotiator: You are comfortable operating at a Director level, negotiating budgets and scope with peers in Product and Engineering VPs. You can articulate the business value of infrastructure investments to non-technical stakeholders
- Hybrid Expertise (Must Have): Proven experience managing footprints in both physical On-Premises/Data Center environments AND Amazon Web Services (AWS) at scale. You understand the complexities of bridging these worlds
- Deep Jenkins at Scale: Architectural understanding of Jenkins managing deployments across hybrid targets (shared libraries, scaling agents across DC and Cloud boundaries)
- Tooling Ecosystem: Advanced strategic use of GitHub Enterprise and Jira for governance and reporting
- Experience with modern infrastructure automation (Terraform/IaC) and container orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS) in production
What the job involves
- We need a Senior Director of DevOps & Developer Productivity who has seen "what good looks like" at enterprise scale and can navigate the complexities of a hybrid landscape
- We need you to come in, assess our diverse infrastructure, and architect the technical foundation, team structure, and culture needed to prepare our engineering organization for its next major evolution
- This is not a traditional IT operations role
- We are looking for a leader who started their career writing application code and transitioned into infrastructure because they wanted to solve bigger, systemic problems
- As the Senior Director, you will sit at the critical intersection of infrastructure operations and the daily developer experience
- You understand the visceral pain of a clunky local environment or a slow build pipeline because you have lived it
- Your mission is to bridge the gap between legacy on-prem stability and modern cloud agility, ensuring our developers can ship value fast, regardless of the target environment
- You will initially be hands-on, stabilizing our current tooling (Jenkins, GitHub, Jira)
- Simultaneously, you will formulate a multi-year strategy, negotiate necessary investments with executive leadership, and hire the team to execute the vision
- Hybrid Infrastructure Strategy: Define a clear, pragmatic strategy for our complex footprint. You will determine what stays on-prem, what moves to AWS, and manage the connectivity between them to ensure scalability and cost-effectiveness (FinOps)
- Requirements Negotiation & Stakeholder Management: Act as the strategic bridge between Product Management, Engineering leadership, and your Platform team. You must translate high-level business goals into technical infrastructure roadmaps. Crucially, you have the experience to negotiate requirements, push back against scope creep, and ensure your team is focused on high-impact work rather than ad-hoc requests
- Team Building & Culture: You will hire and structure the DevOps/Platform Engineering department. You will define a culture that emphasizes automation, service, and deep empathy for the developers trying to ship code across our complex environment
- The Hybrid CI/CD Spine (Jenkins): Take ownership of our Jenkins infrastructure as the critical bridge between worlds. Architect an environment capable of deploying securely to physical on-prem servers and dynamic AWS resources (EC2/EKS/Lambda) at scale
- Source Control & Workflow Governance: Implement enterprise-level best practices for our GitHub organization, introducing appropriate governance and security scanning without crippling speed
- SDLC Visibility (Jira): Standardize Jira workflows across growing teams to ensure leadership maintains visibility into velocity and bottlenecks across the entire organization
- Abstracting Complexity: The goal is to hide the complexity of our hybrid infrastructure from application developers. Define "Golden Paths" that allow developers to ship code safely without needing to understand the underlying network topology
- Eliminate Friction: Drawing on your own background as a developer, obsessively measure DORA metrics to identify where engineers are stuck. Your success is defined by how quickly and painlessly an engineer can move from idea to production
Our take
Software-defined vehicles represent the biggest innovation in automobiles for decades, but there are large obstacles in the way of their growth. The software that defines such vehicles requires over-the-air (OTA) updates and other forms of maintenance, which can quickly become a time-consuming and resource-intensive process.
Sonatus develops cloud-based solutions for software-defined vehicles, providing a platform called Digital Dynamics that empowers automakers to harness vehicle data, add feature updates, diagnose problems, and maintain vehicle infrastructure wirelessly and in real time. The company achieves its flexibility through cloud-empowered data infrastructure, no-code software solutions, and working closely with clients.
Whilst the company faces competition from other IoT vehicle software companies, Sonatus shows great potential to compete through its all-in-one approach. This has earned it impressive funding, which supports further development and the increase of production volume, as well as the company's expansion into the Japanese market.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Dec 2022
$75m
SERIES A
Jul 2021
$35m
SERIES A
Total funding: $110m
Company benefits
- Stock option program
- Flexible working arrangements
- Unlimited PTO
- Comprehensive benefits with generous allowance
- Free in-office food & snacks!
Company HQ
Sunnyvale, CA
Leadership
Jeffrey Chou
(Co-Founder & CEO)Experience as Senior Director of Engineering for Nuova Systems. Founder of Diamanti, where they were CEO and now serve as a Board Member.
Yu Fang
(Co-Founder & CTO/CPO)Head of Mobile Engineering for NAUTO from 2016 to 2018. Experience as CTO of CARDFREE.
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