Role: Global Lead, Data Center, Compute, Storage & Virtualization
Location: Milpitas / Irvine, CA
Employment Type: Contract to hire
Scope: Global Infrastructure Domain Leadership
Role Summary
The Global Lead, Data Center, Compute, Storage & Virtualization will own the strategy, engineering, service delivery, and operational performance of these infrastructure domains across the global enterprise. This leader will be accountable for the people, platforms, processes, and technology lifecycle supporting secure, resilient, and scalable infrastructure services.
This is a hands-on leadership role requiring the ability to set technical direction, lead engineers, architect solutions, and directly participate in implementation and complex troubleshooting. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Dell compute, and Dell enterprise storage, including management of Nutanix platforms across on-premises and public cloud environments.
Working closely with the Chief Infrastructure Architect and leaders across cybersecurity, networking, cloud, and data protection, this individual will translate enterprise architecture into consistent engineering practices and reliable operations. The role will advance patch management, infrastructure as code, and controlled adoption of agentic automation.
Key Responsibilities
Global Domain Ownership and Leadership
- Own the global roadmap, engineering standards, service performance, and lifecycle management for data center, compute, storage, and virtualization platforms.
- Lead and mentor engineers while coordinating delivery across regional teams, vendors, and service providers.
- Establish clear service ownership, operating procedures, escalation paths, and availability, performance, and capacity expectations.
- Lead investment planning, capacity forecasting, licensing, and vendor management; recommend budgets and staffing to infrastructure leadership.
- Partner with the Chief Infrastructure Architect to align domain designs and investments with the global infrastructure strategy.
- Balance modernization programs with operational reliability and business priorities.
Data Center and Compute Engineering
- Lead the design, deployment, and operation of global compute infrastructure, including Dell PowerEdge servers.
- Establish standards for server configurations, firmware, BIOS, provisioning, hardware management, and lifecycle replacement.
- Coordinate rack capacity, power, cooling, cabling, and hardware installation requirements with facilities and regional teams.
- Guide data center consolidation, hardware refreshes, workload migrations, and infrastructure standardization.
- Maintain accurate asset inventory, configuration records, and ownership information.
- Directly troubleshoot complex hardware, operating system, cluster, and performance issues.
Virtualization and Platform Modernization
- Lead engineering and operations for Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV, including platform upgrades, migrations, and performance optimization.
- Manage Hyper-V environments using Windows Server Failover Clustering and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
- Lead Nutanix cluster deployment, administration, lifecycle management, and capacity planning.
- Establish standards for virtual machine provisioning, workload placement, resource allocation, and high availability.
- Lead platform transitions across VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix, including dependency assessment, compatibility validation, migration sequencing, and rollback planning.
- Diagnose issues spanning hypervisors, guest operating systems, storage, and networking.
Hybrid Cloud and Nutanix Management
- Own the operational management of Nutanix across on-premises data centers and supported public cloud deployments, including Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2).
- Establish consistent management practices through Nutanix Prism, covering provisioning, monitoring, access controls, configuration standards, and capacity management.
- Partner with cloud and networking teams on connectivity, identity integration, routing, security controls, and support models.
- Guide workload mobility between on-premises and cloud environments, accounting for application dependencies, performance, protection, and recovery requirements.
- Coordinate upgrades, patching, configuration management, and automation across the hybrid estate.
- Partner with data protection teams to validate hybrid disaster recovery and cloud-based recovery scenarios.
- Work with FinOps teams to manage utilization, cloud consumption, licensing, and operating costs.
Storage Engineering and Operations
- Own engineering and operations for Dell enterprise storage, including platforms such as PowerStore, PowerMax, and Unity.
- Establish standards for block and file storage provisioning, capacity, performance, replication, and lifecycle management.
- Guide storage connectivity across Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NVMe/TCP, as applicable.
- Lead storage migrations, upgrades, consolidation, and performance troubleshooting.
- Validate redundancy across storage fabrics, controllers, host connectivity, and multipathing.
- Partner with networking and data protection teams to ensure storage designs support availability and recovery requirements.
Patching, Security, and Resilience
- Own coordinated patching and upgrade programs for operating systems, hypervisors, server firmware, management platforms, and storage systems.
- Establish compatibility testing, maintenance sequencing, rollback procedures, and post-change validation.
- Partner with cybersecurity to prioritize vulnerability remediation and enforce secure configuration standards.
- Design maintenance procedures that account for workload dependencies, cluster capacity, and service availability.
- Support geographically distributed and active-active environments through validated redundancy, failover, and failback capabilities.
- Partner with the cyber resilience and data protection lead to ensure infrastructure can be protected and recovered.
- Lead technical resolution of major incidents within the domain and drive corrective actions from root-cause analysis.
Infrastructure as Code and Agentic Automation
- Establish infrastructure as code and configuration management practices using Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell, Python, and platform APIs.
- Build reusable, version-controlled workflows for provisioning, configuration, patch orchestration, and compliance validation.
- Integrate automation with source control, delivery pipelines, change management, inventory, and observability platforms.
- Automate configuration drift detection, capacity reporting, and routine operational tasks.
- Evaluate and implement AI-assisted and agentic workflows for diagnostics, incident enrichment, remediation recommendations, and controlled execution.
- Establish access boundaries, approval controls, audit trails, testing, and rollback mechanisms for automated actions.
- Measure improvements in delivery speed, manual effort, configuration accuracy, and service reliability.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of progressive experience in enterprise infrastructure engineering and operations, including leadership of a technical team or infrastructure domain.
- Demonstrated ability to own service outcomes, develop roadmaps, and lead engineers while remaining hands-on.
- Deep experience with Microsoft Hyper-V, Windows Server Failover Clustering, and SCVMM.
- Strong hands-on experience with Nutanix AHV and Prism, including cluster administration, upgrades, troubleshooting, and capacity planning.
- Experience managing hybrid Nutanix environments, including production experience with NC2 and integration with supporting public cloud services.
- Working knowledge of cloud networking, identity and access management, routing, security controls, and cost management.
- Strong experience with Dell PowerEdge, including firmware lifecycle and remote management through iDRAC and OpenManage.
- Hands-on experience with Dell enterprise storage, such as PowerStore, PowerMax, or Unity.
- Strong understanding of storage networking, replication, multipathing, and performance analysis.
- Experience leading infrastructure patching, upgrades, and vulnerability remediation programs.
- Practical experience with infrastructure as code, configuration management, scripting, APIs, and version-controlled automation.
- Experience operating highly available infrastructure and supporting workload migration and disaster recovery across distributed environments.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across compute, virtualization, storage, operating systems, and infrastructure networking.
- Experience managing vendors, capacity forecasts, technology lifecycle plans, and investment priorities.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to coordinate across global engineering, operations, application, and cybersecurity teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in semiconductor, manufacturing, or other global environments with demanding availability requirements.
- Experience leading VMware-to-Hyper-V or Hyper-V-to-Nutanix migrations.
- Experience with hyperconverged and disaggregated infrastructure architectures.
- Broader experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform and their integration with enterprise infrastructure.
- Experience implementing agentic automation or AI-assisted operational workflows with controlled access to infrastructure.
- Experience integrating automation with IT service management, CMDB, observability, and AIOps platforms.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and infrastructure requirements for containerized workloads.
- Familiarity with NetBackup, Rubrik, or Cohesity and their integration with compute, storage, and virtualization platforms.
- Relevant Microsoft, Nutanix, Dell, or infrastructure automation certifications.
Measures of Success
- Infrastructure services consistently meet agreed availability and performance objectives.
- Improved patch compliance and reduced exposure from unsupported platforms and overdue remediation.
- Consistent engineering standards and operating practices across global on-premises and cloud environments.
- Successful migrations, upgrades, and hardware refreshes with controlled business impact.
- Increased automation coverage and reduced manual provisioning and maintenance effort.
- Improved capacity utilization, cost visibility, and lifecycle planning.
- Fewer recurring incidents and faster resolution of complex infrastructure problems.
- A technically strong team with clear accountability and service ownership.
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