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