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Director of Engineering, Compute

Palo Alto, CA

About Groq

Groq delivers fast, efficient AI inference. Our LPU-based system powers GroqCloud™, giving businesses and developers the speed and scale they need. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we are on a mission to make high performance AI compute more accessible and affordable. When real-time AI is within reach, anything is possible. Build fast.

Director of Engineering, Compute

Mission: Lead the Compute team in building and operating the world’s largest hyperscaler specifically designed for AI inference, tailored to Groq’s hardware across our global data center footprint.

The team: The Compute team develops the foundational compute platform and critical services, including Datacenter Infrastructure Management (DCIM), hardware inventory systems, container and inference orchestration frameworks, observability and monitoring tools, and data center operations automation. Your role is pivotal in defining, implementing, and scaling Groq’s hyperscaler infrastructure.

Responsibilities & opportunities in this role:

  • Architect the development of Groq’s hyperscale compute platform, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.
  • Plan: define and execute technical roadmaps that advance Groq’s capability to manage large-scale general and specialized compute infrastructure efficiently.
  • Lead highly technical engineering teams focused on container orchestration, hardware provisioning, and platform automation.
  • Build and grow the organization: attract, hire, mentor, and retain top-tier engineers; shape a culture of automation, simplicity, rapid learning and operational excellence.
  • Operate the fleet: own production Kubernetes clusters and Storage solutions distributed across several geographic regions, driving SLOs, incident response, and continual improvement
  • Ship continuously: enforce robust CI/CD—with container image scanning, automated integration tests, and progressive roll-outs—to keep the platform secure and rapidly evolving.
  • Collaborate globally with data-center, hardware, and hardware teams to ensure seamless capacity expansions, hardware refreshes, and energy-efficiency initiatives.
  • Advanced low-latency networking: partner closely with our networking to ensure we champion modern data-plane technologies (Cilium/eBPF, BGP-based service routing, advanced load balancing) for low-latency throughput and high security.

Ideal candidates have/are:

  • 10+ years in large-scale infrastructure engineering, including 3+ years leading teams that run business-critical, globally distributed fleets.
  • Proven leadership experience in highly technical engineering environments, with a track record of delivering innovative platform solutions and effectively leading, motivating, and developing high-performing engineering teams.
  • Demonstrated excellence in communication, planning, negotiation, and interpersonal interactions across executives, cross-functional stakeholders, and team members, with a strong ability to influence and drive organizational change.
  • Cloud & hybrid experience: History of building, deploying, and operating compute in data centers in addition to augmenting with Cloud-based workloads - ideally GCP.
  • Hands-on lineage: you once built or operated clusters yourself (writing Golang operators, CRDs, and CLI tools), graduated into org leadership, and still dive deep when needed.
  • Experience with on-prem storage technologies and their Kubernetes integrations.
  • CI/CD leadership: design and run pipelines (GitHub Actions, Buildkite, or similar) that build, test, sign, and promote container images at hyperscale velocity

Attributes of a Groqster:

  • Humility - Egos are checked at the door
  • Collaborative & Team Savvy - We make up the smartest person in the room, together
  • Growth & Giver Mindset - Learn it all versus know it all, we share knowledge generously
  • Curious & Innovative - Take a creative approach to projects, problems, and design
  • Passion, Grit, & Boldness - no limit thinking, fueling informed risk taking

If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!

At Groq:

Our goal is to hire and promote an exceptional workforce as diverse as the global populations we serve. Groq is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, inclusion, and belonging in all aspects of our organization. We value and celebrate diversity in thought, beliefs, talent, expression, and backgrounds. We know that our individual differences make us better.

Compensation: At Groq, a competitive base salary is part of our comprehensive compensation package, which includes equity and benefits. For this role, the base salary range is $300,000 to $375,000, determined by your skills, qualifications, experience and internal benchmarks.

Location: Some roles may require being located near or on our primary sites, as indicated in the job description.  

At Groq: Our goal is to hire and promote an exceptional workforce as diverse as the global populations we serve. Groq is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, inclusion, and belonging in all aspects of our organization. We value and celebrate diversity in thought, beliefs, talent, expression, and backgrounds. We know that our individual differences make us better.

 

Groq is an Equal Opportunity Employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status.  We also take affirmative action to offer employment opportunities to minorities, women, individuals with disabilities, and protected veterans.

Groq is committed to working with qualified individuals with physical or mental disabilities. Applicants who would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or who need special assistance or a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application or hiring process may contact us at:  talent@groq.com.  This contact information is for accommodation requests only.  Evaluation of requests for reasonable accommodations will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

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