Director, Software Engineering
Top focus
At ClickUp, we're building the future of work: the first truly converged AI workspace unifying tasks, docs, chat, calendar, and enterprise search, all supercharged by context-driven AI. We are an AI-native company. Every team member is expected to leverage AI daily, and we evaluate AI fluency as part of our hiring process.
Join us and help redefine what's possible. 🚀 Lead ClickUp's Cloud Platform team to deliver reliable, cost-efficient, and scalable AWS infrastructure that stays 3–6 months ahead of product and enterprise demand. This role bridges infrastructure and product engineering: you'll build genuine partnerships across product, AI, and enterprise teams so that ownership is shared and velocity is never blocked by platform constraints.
The Director sets a forward-looking cloud vision, proactively aligns with stakeholders across the business, and ensures the platform scales for multi-shard, multi-region growth while meeting security and compliance commitments (M365, BCDR, SOC 2).
The Role: Cost Efficiency: Drive millions in annual savings by migrating data workloads to EKS and self-hosting OpenSearch on EKS. Ingress Convergence: Deprecate legacy frontend ALBs and consolidate to a single EKS-managed ALB per shard, unblocking faster deployments across the org.
Coverage & Bench Depth: Eliminate single points of ownership across Networking, OpenSearch, and Terraform through cross-training and targeted hiring into coverage gaps. Stakeholder Alignment: Stand up a recurring alignment cadence with Product, AI, Enterprise, and Security so infra planning is driven by demand, not ad-hoc interrupts.
Automation: Ship automated shard buildout via Backstage to remove manual toil from enterprise scaling. Reliability: Cut P0/P1 incidents attributed to Cloud Platform (DNS, ALB misconfiguration) through hardened ingress patterns and Terraform-policy guardrails, including blocking unauthenticated public endpoints.
Roadmap Ownership: Deliver a Q3/Q4 roadmap covering Agent enablement, centralized IaC, and deployment rollout acceleration, tied to AI and Enterprise revenue goals. People Leadership: Manage a senior-heavy team distributed across the US, Canada, and Europe, spanning FTEs and contractors, with a focus on succession planning and bench depth.
Vendor Management: Own multi-million dollar AWS spend accountability and contractor oversight, with a savings-pipeline mindset baked into planning
Qualifications
- Deep AWS infrastructure mastery : EKS, networking (VPC/TGW/DNS), Terraform at scale.
- Strong architectural opinions, not just operational chops.
- Strategic roadmap ownership : Track record setting 6-12 month cloud roadmaps tied to business outcomes (enterprise, AI, cost), not only tech debt cleanup.
- Cross-team influence : Navigates Product, Security, SRE, and DB orgs fluidly.
- Must break the "hesitant to cross the boundary" culture.
- Application-level curiosity : Genuinely understands what the product does, not just the infra underneath.
- Ownership extends past traditional platform boundaries.
- People leadership at scale : Managed and grown senior-heavy, geographically distributed teams across FTE/contractor blends.
- Must build bench depth and succession plans.
- Operational rigor : Strong on-call instincts, incident ownership, RCA follow-through.
- Security-first instincts : This team touches blast radius (auth enforcement, network isolation, shard boundaries).
- A verify-first, never-assume mindset is non-negotiable.
- AI & automation mindset : Real appetite for DevSecOps agents, AI-assisted IaC migrations, and skills-based automation.
- This is on the Q3 roadmap, not a nice-to-have.
- AI/ML infrastructure experience : Scaling workloads like GPU orchestration, model-serving infra, or cost-optimized compute for inference is a strong differentiator.
- Education & experience : BS/MS in CS, Engineering, or equivalent. 10+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering with significant time in a director-level role managing distributed teams.
- Unsure if you meet all the qualifications of this job description but are deeply excited about the role?
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