Infrastructure Manager

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Job Description:

Shield AI is seeking an Infrastructure Manager to lead the team responsible for the enterprise systems and physical infrastructure supporting our engineering, manufacturing, business, and mission-critical environments. This includes compute, storage, virtualization, Windows and Linux platforms, backup and disaster recovery, core infrastructure services, PLM infrastructure, and infrastructure supporting offices, labs, manufacturing facilities, and data centers. This leader will ensure that hybrid infrastructure services remain reliable, secure, scalable, and operationally mature as Shield AI grows. Reporting to the Senior Manager of Cloud & Infrastructure, this role partners closely with Cloud Platform, Network, Cybersecurity, Facilities, Service Delivery, Enterprise Technology Solutions, and engineering teams. The ideal candidate is an experienced people leader with broad infrastructure judgment and a strong record of delivering resilient services. This position may be based in San Mateo, CA or the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area; San Diego, CA; Frisco, TX; or the Seattle-Tacoma, WA area.

What you'll do:

• Lead, coach, and develop a distributed team of infrastructure engineers and systems administrators, including specialists supporting PLM and engineering infrastructure.

• Own team capacity, resource planning, hiring priorities, workload balancing, succession planning, and development of technical leaders within the Infrastructure organization.

• Own the Infrastructure strategy, roadmap, standards, operating model, and service portfolio across on-premises, colocation, edge, lab, manufacturing, and hybrid environments.

• Oversee architecture, implementation, and operations for enterprise compute, virtualization, storage, backup, disaster recovery, Windows and Linux server platforms, and core infrastructure services.

• Provide management oversight for the infrastructure supporting Teamcenter and other mission-critical engineering platforms, partnering with application owners and vendors on reliability, capacity, upgrades, and recovery.

• Drive infrastructure modernization, automation, configuration standardization, lifecycle management, observability, and reduction of operational toil and technical debt.

• Establish priorities, project plans, service objectives, capacity forecasts, lifecycle plans, and measurable outcomes aligned with aircraft, engineering, manufacturing, and company growth.

• Ensure infrastructure services meet requirements for availability, performance, security, compliance, recoverability, and operational supportability.

• Provide management oversight for site and data-center infrastructure, including rack capacity, power and cooling, equipment lifecycle, DCIM and documentation, colocation environments, and infrastructure readiness for new facilities, expansions, relocations, and acquisitions; partner closely with Facilities and Network Engineering while maintaining clear ownership boundaries.

• Partner with Network and Cloud Platform teams on hybrid architecture, connectivity, workload placement, identity integration, and migration of shared services.

• Lead major incidents, root-cause analysis, problem management, change governance, patching and vulnerability remediation, maintenance planning, and on-call readiness.

• Manage hardware, software, licensing, support contracts, managed services, and professional-services vendors; contribute to budgets, forecasts, sourcing, and contract decisions.

• Maintain architecture, configuration, recovery, lifecycle, and operational documentation; communicate service health, project status, risks, and dependencies to technical and executive stakeholders.

Required qualifications:

• 8+ years of progressive experience in enterprise infrastructure or systems engineering, including 4+ years leading infrastructure engineers or systems administrators.

• Broad experience designing and operating enterprise compute, virtualization, storage, backup, disaster recovery, and Windows and Linux server environments.

• Strong understanding of high availability, capacity planning, performance management, patching, vulnerability remediation, monitoring, and infrastructure lifecycle management.

• Experience supporting data centers, colocation facilities, server rooms, labs, manufacturing environments, or other distributed infrastructure at enterprise scale.

• Experience leading infrastructure modernization, automation, migrations, platform upgrades, and recovery testing with limited business disruption.

• Demonstrated ability to manage production operations, incidents, changes, service health, technical debt, and geographically distributed services.

• Strong partnership skills across Facilities, Network, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Service Delivery, application teams, and business stakeholders.

• Strong people leadership skills, including hiring, coaching, performance management, delegation, and development of senior technical talent.

• Experience managing infrastructure vendors, support agreements, professional services, budgets, forecasts, and lifecycle investment planning.

• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including executive-ready status, risk, and decision communication.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Ability to travel periodically to Shield AI locations and participate in planned after-hours work or incident response as needed.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience supporting aerospace, defense, manufacturing, engineering, government contracting, or another regulated environment.

• Experience integrating infrastructure following acquisitions, site consolidations, relocations, or rapid organizational growth.

• Experience with VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, NetApp, Cohesity, Active Directory, Entra ID, infrastructure monitoring, and configuration-management tools.

• Experience supporting PLM platforms such as Siemens Teamcenter or similarly complex engineering applications and their infrastructure dependencies.

• Knowledge of CMMC, NIST 800-171, ITAR, backup immutability, disaster recovery, and controlled unclassified information environments.

• Experience with infrastructure as code, PowerShell, Python, Bash, Ansible, Terraform, or related automation practices.

• Relevant infrastructure, virtualization, cloud, security, or IT service management certifications.

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Full-time regular employee offer package:

Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Temporary employee offer package:

Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.

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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.