Senior Manager, Infrastructure and Labs

Organization: Wind River Cloud Platform Engineering

About Wind River

Wind River is a global leader in software for mission-critical intelligent systems, delivering solutions that power telecommunications, aerospace, defense, industrial, automotive, and medical applications worldwide. The company develops cloud-native infrastructure platforms designed to support highly available, secure, and scalable edge and distributed cloud deployments.

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced Cloud Platform Senior Manager to lead engineering teams responsible for the development, operation, and continuous evolution of the Wind River Cloud Platform. This role combines leadership of software engineering, cloud infrastructure, networking, test laboratories, TestOps, and platform operations.

The successful candidate will be responsible for delivering highly available cloud infrastructure solutions built on technologies such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, and StarlingX while overseeing the engineering infrastructure and validation environments that support product development, customer deployments, and mission-critical production workloads.

This position requires a strategic leader with deep experience in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, operational excellence, networking, development, testing and organizational leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership

• Lead and develop high-performing engineering, infrastructure, and operations teams.
• Establish a culture of accountability, innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Drive execution across multiple simultanious product releases, ensuring predictable delivery and quality outcomes.
• Coach and mentor engineering managers, technical leads, and senior engineers.
• Manage workforce planning, performance management, and talent development.
• Drive and measure Improvement of operations on a daily basis.

Cloud Platform Strategy & Delivery

• Define and execute technical strategy for cloud infrastructure platforms based on Kubernetes, OpenStack, and StarlingX.
• Drive architectural alignment across compute, storage, networking, orchestration, and platform services.
• Balance feature delivery, customer commitments, platform scalability, and technical debt management.
• Partner with Product Management, Architecture, Field Engineering, and Customer Support organizations.

Infrastructure Engineering & Operations

• Own the engineering infrastructure supporting development, build, integration, testing, and release activities.
• Lead teams managing cloud infrastructure, virtualization environments, storage systems, compute resources, network  and platform services.
• Establish roadmaps for infrastructure modernization, scalability, security, and operational efficiency.
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code and automation initiatives across the organization.

Test Lab & Validation Environment Management

• Own global engineering laboratories supporting software development, integration, validation, certification, and customer testing.
• Ensure lab environments accurately model customer deployments and production use cases.
• Lead hardware lifecycle management, capacity planning, asset management, and lab expansion initiatives.
• Drive automation of provisioning, deployment, testing, and environment management.
• Establish key operational metrics for utilization, availability, quality, and engineering productivity.

Networking Leadership

• Oversee enterprise, cloud, and local lab networking infrastructure working with corporate and lab managers.
• Direct strategy and operations for routing, switching, firewalls, VPNs, FC, etc.
• Ensure network architectures support highly available distributed cloud and edge computing environments.
• Drive network reliability, performance optimization, capacity management, and security compliance.

Operational Excellence

• Drive adoption of automation, observability, monitoring, and self-service engineering capabilities.
• Champion modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development and operational tooling.
• Establish reliability engineering practices, operational readiness reviews, and incident management processes.

Customer Success & Reliability

• Lead response to critical customer escalations and platform incidents.
• Establish and manage service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level agreements (SLAs), and operational metrics.
• Drive root-cause analysis and corrective action initiatives.
• Ensure delivery of enterprise-grade reliability, security, and serviceability.

Open Source & Industry Engagement

• Support participation and leadership within open-source ecosystems, including StarlingX and related cloud-native projects.
• Foster collaboration with industry partners, customers, and engineering communities.
• Influence platform direction across organizational and technical boundaries.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, cloud infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience leading geographically distributed teams.
• Demonstrated success delivering complex, highly available, multi-component platforms.
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure, networking, and operational environments at scale.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture and distributed systems design.
• Proven ability to build and lead high-performing technical organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

Cloud & Platform Technologies

• Kubernetes
• OpenStack
• StarlingX
• Containers and cloud-native technologies
• Edge computing platforms
• Linux-based infrastructure

Infrastructure & DevOps

• VMware, KVM, or similar virtualization platforms
• Terraform, Ansible, or Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks
• Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or similar tools
• Platform observability and monitoring solutions
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices

Networking

• Data center networking
• BGP, OSPF, EVPN, VXLAN
• SDN and network virtualization
• Network security architecture
• Load balancing and service mesh technologies

Test Infrastructure

• Large-scale engineering test labs
• Automated validation environments
• Performance and scalability testing
• Hardware qualification and lifecycle management
• Customer proof-of-concept and certification environments

Leadership Competencies

The ideal candidate will demonstrate:

• Strategic thinking and technical vision.
• Strong organizational and people leadership skills.
• Ability to influence multiple engineering disciplines.
• Effective decision-making in complex and ambiguous environments.
• Customer-focused leadership and operational excellence.
• Strong communication skills with executive, customer, and engineering stakeholders.
• Passion for continuous improvement, automation, and engineering efficiency.

Success Measures

Success in this role will be measured by:

• Delivery of cloud platform roadmap commitments.
• Platform reliability, scalability, and operational performance.
• Engineering productivity and quality improvements.
• Test lab utilization and automation maturity.
• Improved utilization of Infrastructure.
• Infrastructure stability and operational efficiency.
• Customer satisfaction and issue resolution effectiveness.
• Employee engagement, retention, and team development.
• Budget management for lab acquisitions.

This role represents a senior engineering leadership position with responsibility spanning cloud platform engineering, infrastructure operations, networking, DevOps, test laboratories, and distributed systems delivery in support of mission-critical cloud and edge computing solutions.

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