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Salary: USD 320,000 - 380,000 / annual
Hadrian is building autonomous factories that enable aerospace and defense companies to manufacture rockets, satellites, jets, and ships up to 10x faster and 2x cheaper. The company combines advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing to reindustrialize American production. Backed by T. Rowe Price, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, Hadrian is expanding rapidly with Factory 3 launching in Mesa, Arizona, and new initiatives including Hadrian Maritime and a Factory-as-a-Service model.
As Director of Engineering, Infrastructure, you will own the software backbone—the nervous system—of Hadrian's physical factories. You will lead a team of 12-15 engineers spanning Kubernetes and compute platform engineering, site reliability engineering, and core infrastructure (networking, storage). Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you will work closely with DevOps, Product Engineering, and Security teams to ensure systems are fast, reliable, and ready to scale globally.
Key responsibilities include defining and executing infrastructure strategy across compute, networking, and storage; architecting and scaling Kubernetes platforms for multi-region, high-availability workloads; owning reliability and performance of core infrastructure systems with established SLOs/SLIs; driving cost optimization across cloud and on-premises environments; leading and growing the infrastructure team; partnering with adjacent teams while maintaining clear ownership boundaries; ensuring security and regulatory compliance; and driving multi-region and high-availability architecture as Hadrian expands to new factory locations.
You will need 10-15+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering, including 5+ years in engineering leadership. Deep, hands-on expertise in Kubernetes (cluster architecture, scheduling, scaling, day-2 operations) is essential, along with strong foundations in compute, networking, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP). Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or equivalent), designing for reliability and failure recovery, and building high-performing engineering teams is required. A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent hands-on experience is expected.
What will set you apart: deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals including control plane and scheduler; experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd); multi-cluster and multi-region orchestration; strong infrastructure security best practices; and background operating at high scale with multi-region deployments or high-QPS systems.
This role has a clear growth trajectory as Hadrian expands its global factory footprint, with potential progression toward VP of Infrastructure with expanded ownership over global infrastructure strategy and potential SRE organization oversight.
