Director, Platform Engineering (EMEA)

About Volta

Volta is the category-defining, fully vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform – from capital to clusters to software, under a founder-led enterprise. Our mission is The Utility of Compute™: AI infrastructure as dependable and available as electricity, for every organization that needs it. Launched with a $10B strategic partnership with one of the leading frontier AI labs, a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $5B AI Infrastructure Fund, Volta is building the infrastructure layer of the AI era from the ground up. We are 100+ people across London, Palo Alto, and New York, with rapid growth expectations to hundreds.

About The Role

Volta builds and operates large scale GPU compute infrastructure for frontier AI customers. The software that turns racks of GPUs into a usable platform is its own product.

You will lead Platform Engineering across EMEA and act as deputy to the VP, Platform Engineering, who is based in Palo Alto. You own the European teams and their delivery, and you partner with the VP closely enough that the two of you run one organization across two continents.

This is a building role. Volta already has platform engineers in Europe, today managed from the US, and bringing them into a local structure is your first priority before growing the region into several teams. It is a software leadership role, but not an abstracted one. Our platform sits directly on GPU hardware, fabric, and physical sites, and it only works if it stays coherent with them.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead the EMEA platform engineering teams and own their delivery against the platform roadmap you set with the VP.
• Bring the platform engineers already in Europe into the EMEA structure in a way that keeps continuity for both the people and the work.
• Grow the region across multiple capability teams, build the team lead layer beneath you, and own hiring in region without lowering the bar.
• Act as the VP's deputy: represent Platform Engineering in EMEA, step in when they are unavailable, and keep the two regions aligned so the platform stays coherent.
• Stay hands-on enough to lead architecture and design reviews and to call the right answer when a technical debate needs one.
• Own reliability and operational quality for what the region ships, including on-call practice, incident response, and closing structural gaps after incidents.
• Own the boundary between the platform software and the hardware, fabric, and site layers beneath it, working with the infrastructure and project delivery teams whose work it depends on.
• Work with security engineering across the development lifecycle so security is built into the platform rather than added afterwards.
• Be credible in front of customers in region when the moment calls for it.

What You Bring

• Track record building and leading software engineering teams, ideally toward 20-plus people across more than one team.
• Experience taking over and reorganizing an existing team, including moving people into a new reporting structure and keeping them engaged through it.
• Engineering leadership where you set direction and own delivery, not pure people management. You are still credible in a design review.
• Demonstrable understanding of what sits under a cloud service: virtualization, storage, networking, multi-tenancy, and the bare metal beneath them. You do not need to have run an IaaS business, but you need to know how one works.
• Enough working knowledge of the hardware to reason about where software meets GPU, fabric, and storage reality.
• Experience taking software from an early stage through to production, not only greenfield prototypes.
• The maturity to deputize for a senior leader across distance and time zones without needing to be managed.
• Judgment to work across organizational boundaries with peer engineering leaders, defining clean seams rather than fighting over them.
• Based in or willing to be on-site in London, with travel across a US and EU distributed organization.

Nice to Have (But Not Essential)

• Direct experience with an IaaS or cloud platform, built or operated at scale.
• Background at a neocloud, hyperscaler, GPU cloud, or HPC environment where the software platform was the product.
• Familiarity with our current stack: KVM and QEMU, Ceph and SPDK, BGP and VXLAN, Kubernetes operators, PXE and Flatcar provisioning, and Go, Python, and Rust. This is where the platform is today, not a constraint on where it goes.
• Experience in a multi-region engineering organization, or deputizing for a more senior leader.
• Experience integrating or leveling up an inherited or acquired engineering team.
• Exposure to building higher-level services on top of an infrastructure platform.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development and a view on scaling agent-assisted workflows across an organization.
• Experience leading teams under ISO 27001 or SOC 2 obligations. REQ-78

What We Offer

At Volta, we believe people do their best work when they feel supported, trusted and able to grow. We're building a company where you can make an impact, keep a healthy balance between work and life, and build a career you're proud of. As a global team, we do our best to provide great benefits wherever you're based. While some benefits vary by country due to local regulations, we believe looking after our people is simply the right thing to do.

• Competitive salary based on the work you do here, not your previous salary
• Equity in Volta, giving you the opportunity to share in the company's long-term success
• Retirement/pension contributions
• Comprehensive health, wellbeing and insurance benefits
• Generous number of vacation days each year

Additional Information

Equal Opportunity

Volta is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and make employment decisions based on skills, qualifications, experience and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic.

Accessibility

Volta is committed to providing an accessible recruitment experience for all candidates. If you require accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the application or interview process, please contact us at askpeople@volta.com. We will work with you to identify reasonable accommodations that enable you to participate fully in the hiring process.

Candidate Privacy Notice

By applying, you consent to the processing of your personal data for recruitment purposes in accordance with applicable data protection laws, including the UK GDPR, EU GDPR and relevant US state privacy regulations. Your data will be shared only with those involved in the hiring process and will not be used for unrelated purposes. For details, see our Recruitment & Candidate Privacy Notice.

Note to Recruitment Agencies

Volta does not accept unsolicited CVs or candidate profiles from recruitment agencies. Any unsolicited submissions, including those sent directly to hiring managers or employees, will be treated as the property of Volta. No agency fees will be payable unless a valid, signed recruitment agreement is in place, and the agency has been specifically engaged for the relevant vacancy.