Sr. Director of DevOps & Developer Productivity

Join a high-performing team at Sonatus that’s redefining what cars can do in the era of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDV).

At Sonatus, we’re driving the transformation to AI-enabled software-defined vehicles. Traditional automotive software methods can’t keep pace with consumer expectations shaped by the mobile industry—where features evolve rapidly, update seamlessly, and improve continuously. That’s why leading OEMs trust Sonatus to accelerate this shift. Our technology is already in production across more than 5 million vehicles on the road today and rapidly expanding.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with 250+ employees worldwide, Sonatus combines the agility of a fast-growing company with the scale and impact of an established partner. Backed by strong funding and proven by global deployment, we’re solving some of the most interesting and complex challenges in the industry. Join us and help redefine what’s possible as we shape the future of mobility.

The Opportunity:

We are currently a lean, highly collaborative team sitting at a critical inflection point. We are poised for a new phase of accelerated growth, but our infrastructure reality is complex. We operate in a hybrid environment, balancing critical on-premises systems with a rapidly expanding footprint on AWS.

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.

The Role

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.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy, Negotiation & Leadership

• 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.

Platform & Tooling Architecture

• 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.

Developer Experience (DevEx)

• 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.

What We’re Looking For

The Profile

• 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.

Technical Expertise

• 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.

Why Join Us Now?

• The Challenge: This is the ultimate test of your ability to apply enterprise knowledge pragmatically. You get to solve complex problems involving real hardware and cutting-edge cloud services simultaneously.
• Impact: You will define the technical DNA of the company for years to come. The hybrid systems and teams you build will be the foundation of our future growth.
• Comp & Equity: We offer a competitive salary and equity, allowing you to share in the upside of the growth you help create.

Benefits Offered:

• Competitive compensation and equity program
• Health care plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Flexible and Dependent Care Expense program
• Retirement plan (401k)
• Life Insurance (Basic, Voluntary & AD&D)
• Unlimited paid time off per year, 15 paid holidays
• Hybrid office work arrangement/flexibility

Perk Offerings include:

• Complimentary lunches, snacks, and beverages during on-site working days
• Wellness benefit allowances (towards gym membership and fitness programs)
• Internet reimbursement
• Computer Accessory Allowance

Employee Engagement Offerings:

• Departmental team building and outings
• Employee Referral Program
• Culture/Employee Satisfaction Surveys - Feedback matters!