Director, Engineering IT Operations

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential semiconductor client in their search for a Director of Engineering IT Operations based in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is a strategic leadership role responsible for the infrastructure that supports over 1,000 chip design engineers across multiple global sites. You'll oversee high-performance compute environments, EDA tool infrastructure, job scheduling systems, revision control platforms, enterprise storage, and engineering productivity tooling.

Our talent team is seeking a leader who combines deep technical expertise in semiconductor infrastructure with proven organizational leadership capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the infrastructure strategy supporting semiconductor design and engineering operations across global locations
• Ensure availability, performance, scalability, and security of platforms used for chip development workflows
• Lead teams responsible for Linux infrastructure, compute farms, enterprise storage, revision control, automation, and observability
• Drive operational excellence across 24x7 production environments, including incident response, root cause analysis, change management, and disaster recovery planning
• Partner with silicon engineering, CAD/EDA teams, IT, security, program management, and executive leadership to align infrastructure priorities with business goals
• Improve engineering productivity by advancing automation, self-service capabilities, and platform reliability
• Develop capacity plans and long-range infrastructure roadmaps to support continued growth in compute, storage, and engineering demand
• Establish and maintain service-level expectations, performance metrics, and continuous improvement practices across engineering IT operations

What We're Looking For

Linux Infrastructure Expertise:

• Extensive experience architecting, deploying, and supporting Linux platforms for complex engineering applications
• Demonstrated experience administering large-scale Linux environments (5,000+ servers or equivalent)
• Strong expertise with RHEL, CentOS, or similar variants
• Deep knowledge of NFS, LDAP, Active Directory integration, DNS, DHCP, SSH, PAM, security hardening, and identity management
• Enterprise storage infrastructure experience including NAS/SAN topologies, managing tens or hundreds of petabytes, and disaster recovery strategies
• Multi-site or global engineering environment support experience

HPC and Compute Farm Administration:

• Extensive experience operating and scaling distributed compute environments supporting semiconductor design workloads
• Strong working knowledge of IBM Spectrum LSF, including job scheduling, queue architecture, resource allocation, fair-share scheduling, and EDA workload tuning
• Experience with millions of jobs per day preferred
• CPU and memory optimization, farm utilization analytics, and capacity forecasting experience

Semiconductor and EDA Environment Knowledge:

• Strong understanding of semiconductor engineering workflows and infrastructure dependencies
• Familiarity with RTL-to-GDSII flows, verification regressions, simulation farms, synthesis and place-and-route infrastructure
• Experience with EDA license management and vendor environments (Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor)
• Clear understanding of downtime impact on tapeout schedules and the importance of deterministic engineering environments

Revision Control and Data Management:

• Deep operational knowledge of Perforce administration at enterprise scale, including database management, backup/recovery, replication, and large binary repository performance
• Additional experience preferred with Git, GitLab, Gerrit, GitHub, and CI/CD for hardware development flows

Automation and Infrastructure Engineering:

• Strong background in infrastructure automation, platform engineering, and observability
• Experience with Puppet, Python, shell scripting, Ansible, Terraform; Kubernetes preferred
• Experience with monitoring platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or ELK
• Strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code, automated provisioning, and configuration management

Leadership Qualifications:

• Demonstrable experience leading infrastructure or platform engineering teams
• Experience managing senior technical teams including Linux administrators, HPC engineers, storage engineers, and DevOps teams
• Proven ability to build and scale organizations supporting 1,000+ engineers in demanding technical environments
• Demonstrated success leading 24x7 production operations, incident management, change management, and SLA/SLO ownership
• Strong ability to work effectively across silicon engineering, CAD/EDA teams, IT, security, and executive leadership
• Excellent communication skills with ability to influence across technical and executive audiences
• Hands-on mindset with judgment to prioritize reliability, scale, and engineer productivity

Important Note: Export control restrictions based upon applicable laws and regulations would prohibit candidates who are nationals of certain embargoed countries from working in this position. Candidates must be able to access technical data without a requirement for an export license.

How We Work with You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our recruiting team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and ensure alignment with the role requirements. Once we confirm you're a strong match, we will submit your profile to our client for consideration. Please do not attempt to contact the client directly, as all applications must be coordinated through our team to be considered.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive with the market for this senior leadership role.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, or veteran status.