Director of Infrastructure

📋 Description

• • As the Director of Infrastructure at Allspice Inc., you will be instrumental in shaping the future of hardware development by leading the charge in building and maintaining a robust, secure, and scalable infrastructure. This role offers a unique opportunity to define the company's infrastructure strategy, enhance its security posture, and drive compliance programs, all while building and leading a high-impact team. You will be a hands-on leader, blending strategic vision with practical execution, contributing approximately 60% to management and strategic initiatives and 40% to individual technical contributions. Reporting directly to the CTO, this position demands a proactive, self-driven individual with a passion for building secure, scalable systems and a desire for executive-level ownership in a rapidly growing startup environment.
• • **Strategic Leadership and Security Ownership:** You will be the ultimate owner of AllSpice's security posture, responsible for developing and implementing comprehensive security policies, establishing effective incident response protocols, and ensuring robust disaster recovery plans are in place. This includes conducting ongoing risk assessments to proactively identify and mitigate potential threats. A key responsibility will be driving SOC 2 compliance, coordinating penetration testing, and managing audit processes. You will also evaluate the need for and pursue additional security certifications to meet the evolving demands of enterprise and government clients. Furthermore, you will make critical architectural decisions regarding infrastructure direction, including cloud strategy, cost optimization, high availability, and scaling, ensuring our systems can support rapid growth and demanding workloads. Collaboration with legal counsel on security and data-protection matters, including Data Processing Agreements (DPAs), breach notification obligations, and regulatory compliance, will be essential.
• • **Customer and Go-to-Market Coordination:** This role requires close partnership with customer success and sales teams to facilitate seamless enterprise deployments. You will support IT security reviews, manage Single Sign-On (SSO) and OpenID Connect (OIDC) integrations, and act as the primary technical point of contact for customer InfoSec questionnaires and procurement processes. Your expertise will be crucial in supporting self-hosted and GovCloud deployments for customers with stringent ITAR, EAR, or CUI requirements, ensuring compliance and customer satisfaction.
• • **People Management and Team Building:** As the infrastructure team grows, you will be responsible for hiring, mentoring, and managing talented infrastructure engineers. You will set clear team goals, define efficient processes, and establish reliable on-call rotations to ensure 24/7 system availability. You will also participate in the on-call rotation yourself and lead incident response efforts when necessary, demonstrating a commitment to operational excellence. Creating clear growth paths for individual contributors and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence within the team will be paramount.
• • **Hands-On Infrastructure Engineering:** While a leadership role, this position is also deeply technical. You will architect and maintain production AWS environments using Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code principles. Automation will be a key focus, encompassing deployments, backups, and disaster recovery across both cloud and self-hosted configurations. You will continuously monitor and improve the performance, availability, and cost efficiency of our production systems. Close collaboration with application developers will be necessary to deploy infrastructure solutions that directly address product challenges and enhance user experience.
• • **Example Projects:** Your contributions could include leading an enterprise customer through a complex self-hosted deployment, including architecture reviews, SSO integration, and security sign-off; scaling infrastructure to support zero-downtime deployments across multi-region AWS accounts; driving a SOC 2 Type II audit to successful completion and establishing an ongoing compliance cadence; evaluating and pursuing additional security certifications to cater to enterprise and government clients; stress-testing backup and disaster recovery procedures and publishing comprehensive runbooks; identifying and implementing opportunities for cloud spend reduction while simultaneously improving performance; and coordinating tabletop exercises and incident response drills with the Security Incident Response Team.
• • **Our Stack:** You will work with a modern technology stack including Terraform & Docker Swarm on AWS, Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus for observability, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, Playwright for e2e testing, a Gitea application fork, Go for server-side development, and PostgreSQL for database management.