Head of Infrastructure Support (San Francisco)
About Nscale Nscale is the vertically integrated AI cloud engineered for AI. We own and operate the full stack — energy, data centres, GPU superclusters, orchestration, and AI services — delivering high-performance infrastructure to AI-native companies, enterprises, and governments across Europe and the US. We are deploying GPU capacity at hyperscale, operating some of the densest, most advanced AI infrastructure in the world. About The Role The Head of Infrastructure Support owns Infrastructure Support for their region — the team, the function, and its impact on customers. Reporting directly to the VP of Support and operating alongside counterpart Heads of Infrastructure Support across EMEA, the US, and APAC, you are accountable for the success of regional support outcomes: service performance, escalation quality, customer experience, and the health of the GPU estates your team supports. The regional Infrastructure Support engineers report directly to you, and you own their management end to end — hiring, 1:1s, performance reviews, development planning, and documented performance management through to outcome. Their performance, growth, and results are your responsibility. You will grow your regional Infrastructure Support team during a period of rapid company scaling, embed a consistent operating model with your counterparts in the other regions to deliver true follow-the-sun coverage, and act as the organisational accountability layer for your region — ensuring that strategic and tactical work spanning Support and Operations lands with clear owners and gets driven to completion. As the function maturing, you will own a global capability area on behalf of all regions and shape your team's structure — including developing team leads — as headcount grows. You remain technically credible: close enough to GPU infrastructure, high-performance fabrics, and Linux operations to lead complex incident response, challenge technical decisions on their merits, and earn the respect of Senior Engineers — while spending the majority of your time leading. Experience Required 8 years in infrastructure, operations, or support engineering in production environments, including 4 years of direct line management of engineers in an operational support function, with demonstrable ownership of performance management. Significant exposure to GPU, HPC, or large-scale data centre estates. What You'll Be Doing Regional Ownership & Accountability Own the success of Infrastructure Support for your region: service outcomes, customer impact, and team performance sit with you. Own regional service performance against defined KPIs — SLA adherence, MTTR, first-response time, backlog health, and CSAT — with accurate reporting to the VP of Support and senior leadership. Identify regional risks — capacity, capability, coverage, or customer — early, and either resolve them or escalate them with a clear recommendation. Own regional capacity modelling and headcount planning: forecast support demand against fleet growth and customer onboarding, and make the business case for investment to the VP of Support. Act as the regional accountability layer during rapid growth: when cross-functional work spanning Support, DC Operations, deployment, firmware, and Engineering lacks a clear owner, make sure it gets one and gets done. Partner with the Heads of Infrastructure Support in the other regions — across EMEA, the US, and APAC — to run a single global function: consistent standards, processes, and quality, with true follow-the-sun handover between regions. Own a global capability area on behalf of all regions — such as escalation management standards, the knowledge and runbook system, or the tooling and automation roadmap — working with other Heads of Infrastructure Support defining the standard every regional Support team operates to. People Leadership & Team Building Own day-to-day people management for your regional Infrastructure Support team: regular 1:1s, performance reviews, development planning, and documented performance management — including underperformance — through to outcome. Hire and grow the team: define role requirements, run structured interviews, and build a bench of engineers who meet Nscale's technical and communication bar. Design your team's structure as the region scales, appointing and developing team leads and building second-line management capability as headcount grows. Set and monitor individual and team objectives, driving accountability and continuous improvement. Design and own shift planning, rota coverage, and on-call scheduling for the region, ensuring sustainable 24/7 support in coordination with the global coverage model. Identify skills gaps and drive upskilling through training, mentoring, and knowledge sharing across teams. Ensure roles, responsibilities, and expectations are clearly understood and consistently applied. Service & Operational Performance Own ticket queue health for the region: accurate prioritisation, timely resolution, and clean escalation flow from frontline triage into L2/L3. Monitor team productivity and workload trends, addressing bottlenecks before they become service risks. Ensure adherence to ITIL-aligned processes across incident, request, change, and problem management. Improve dashboards, alerting, and runbooks to reduce repeat incidents and drive right-first-time resolution. Maintain consistent standards, processes, and documentation across regional teams; ensure compliance with audit, security, and operational requirements. Incident, Escalation & Stakeholder Leadership Act as the senior regional escalation point for complex or high-impact incidents, including customer-facing escalations, participating in regional on-call as required. Lead post-incident reviews, identify recurring patterns, and ensure follow-up actions are tracked and delivered — converting incidents into problem records and durable fixes. Represent Infrastructure Support to regional customers and internal senior stakeholders; communicate clearly, candidly, and concisely at every level from engineer to executive. Contribute to readiness and support planning for new services, data centre deployments, and customer onboarding in the region. Technical Leadership & Contribution Work alongside Senior Engineers on complex incidents, technical improvements, and operational tooling — close enough to the work to lead it credibly. Maintain hands‑on fluency across GPU infrastructure (drivers, firmware, hardware fault isolation, RMA workflows), Linux at scale, and east‑west high-performance fabrics (InfiniBand/RoCE diagnostics and fault isolation). Guide investigation quality: evidence‑led diagnosis, structured troubleshooting, and handovers that stand up to scrutiny. Contribute to scripting and automation direction to reduce toil across the regional operation. Travel to Nscale or customer sites when needed to lead onsite support activity. About You Leadership experience. 5 years of direct line management of engineers in an operational support environment, with end-to-end ownership of performance management: reviews, development plans, and documented underperformance processes through to outcome. You can describe your management framework and point to engineers you've grown. Operational ownership. Experience owning team workload, prioritisation, and service delivery against SLAs, with accountability for the numbers — and experience explaining those numbers to senior leadership. Function building. Experience hiring, scaling, or standing up support/operations capability in a fast-moving environment, including capacity modelling and headcount planning against demand; comfortable operating where processes are still evolving and helping define them without slowing delivery. Communication. Excellent written and verbal communication — clear, specific, and concise at every level, from ticket notes to executive updates to difficult customer conversations. We treat communication quality as a core leadership skill and assess it directly. Decisiveness and accountability. A bias for decisive action and calculated risk in ambiguous situations; you take ownership of outcomes, speak candidly, disagree when appropriate, and commit fully once decisions are made. Technical foundation — 8 years across: Linux systems engineering in production, GPU infrastructure, high-performance east-wester fabrics, HPC scheduling and orchestration, networking fundamentals, data centre operations, observability and incident response, automation, process literacy. Strong understanding of ITIL-aligned incident, problem, and change management, and of SRE practices — runbooks, toil reduction, and continuous improvement. Adaptability. Comfortable with out-of-hours escalations, regional on-call participation, and travel for onsite leadership. Nice to Have Deeper GPU/HPC exposure: NCCL-based performance troubleshooting, NVLink/NVSwitch, Slurm-scheduled multi-GPU workloads, or rack-scale systems. High-performance storage: Exposure to VAST or comparable AI-optimised storage platforms, Ceph, or NFS at scale. OpenStack and fleet operations tooling: OpenStack operations, or fleet-scale provisioning and health tooling (MAAS, NetBox, Redfish-driven automation, or similar). Kubernetes: Operating or supporting clusters and GPU operator stacks. Helpful context for our platform, though not the core of this role.
