VP Platform Engineering

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, and it is the one you will own.

You will build and run the organization behind Volta's platform: the multi-tenant IaaS, the software that provisions and manages the bare metal beneath it, the network fabric integration, and over time the higher-level services that sit on top of an AI factory. You set the strategic direction for all of it under high-level guidance from the CTO, and you build the organization that delivers it.

This is a building role, not a caretaking one. You inherit a strong early engineering presence, including a principal engineer leading the first US team and engineers in Europe who will move into a local structure under a Director, Platform Engineering, EMEA acting as your deputy. That role is not yet filled, and you will hire it.

You report to the CTO, sit alongside Volta's other functional leaders, and partner closely with the CPO on product direction without sitting inside that reporting line. It is a software leadership role, but not an abstracted one. Our platform sits directly on GPU hardware, high-performance fabric, and physical sites, and it only works if it stays coherent with them.

What You Own

• The platform. The multi-tenant IaaS and bare metal management stacks, the network fabric integration and the software that programs it, the customer-facing console and APIs, the operational and analytics tooling above the data center layer, the build-versus-buy calls, and the architecture that keeps all of it coherent as Volta scales.

• The organization. Headcount and budget, the leadership structure beneath you, the hiring bar, and the health and retention of an organization growing toward 50-plus engineers across two continents.

• Delivery and reliability. The platform meeting its commitments to internal and customer-facing stakeholders, at the operational quality frontier AI deployments demand.

• The interfaces. Clean, well-understood boundaries with the project delivery and infrastructure engineering functions, the CDO's organization, security engineering, and product.

Why this Role

Volta is early enough that the decisions this person makes will define how the platform gets built for years, and late enough that the customers are real and the deadlines are contractual. If building and leading the software organization behind some of the largest AI deployments in the world is the right problem, we would like to talk.

What You Will Be Doing

Strategy and Direction

• Own the strategy for Volta's platform software: where the IaaS, bare metal management, and network platform layers go, what we build versus buy, and how the platform evolves as the business scales.

• Translate the product roadmap owned by the CPO into a concrete platform roadmap, in strategic alignment with the CTO, and own execution against it.

• Make the architectural calls that keep the platform coherent as scope and headcount grow.

Building the Organization

• Grow platform engineering toward 50-plus engineers across the US and EU, deliberately and without lowering the hiring bar.

• Structure the organization as capability teams that own defined parts of the stack, including compute, storage, control plane and APIs, confidential computing, networking, and the customer-facing surface.

• Build the leadership layer beneath you: team leads, the Director for EMEA as your deputy, and the management bench that lets you stop being the escalation point for everything.

• Own hiring: define requirements, raise the bar, and close strong candidates.

Technical Leadership

• Stay close enough to the technology to lead architecture and design reviews, drive the hard technical debates, and call the right answer when it matters.

• Own the boundary between the platform software and the hardware, fabric, and site layers beneath it, so nothing breaks between the cloud abstraction and what it runs on.

• Own reliability as a function, not a team virtue: on-call practice, incident response, and the structural fixes that follow.

• Take the early-stage stacks forward and reshape them as needed. Current technology choices are a starting point you are free to evolve, not a constraint you inherit.

Working Across Volta

• Be a trusted engineering partner to the CPO and the product organization, aligned on platform direction without that partnership running through a reporting line.

• Keep tight boundaries with the project delivery and infrastructure engineering functions, particularly at the seam where a deployment hands over into the long-lived platform.

• Work with security engineering across the development lifecycle so security is built into the platform rather than added afterwards. Our customer contracts carry compliance obligations, and the platform has to be able to evidence them.

• Represent the platform at the executive level, and be credible in front of frontier AI customers when the moment calls for it.

What You Bring

• Track record building and scaling a software engineering organization at VP or equivalent level, from a small team toward 50-plus people, including the org design, hiring, and a layer of managers and leads reporting into you.

• Executive engineering leadership where you set direction and own outcomes across a function, 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 layer 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 keep the layers from breaking against each other and to reason about where software meets GPU, fabric, and storage reality. Not a hardware specialist, but not abstracted away from it either.

• Experience owning and evolving existing production systems, not only greenfield builds.

• Experience leading a distributed organization across regions and time zones, including through a deputy rather than directly.

• The maturity to take high-level direction and turn it into strategy and execution without needing the details handed to you.

• Judgment to work across organizational boundaries with peer engineering and infrastructure leaders, defining clean seams rather than fighting over them.

• Comfortable with full-time on-site presence in Palo Alto and travel across a US and EU 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 integrating or leveling up an inherited or acquired engineering team.

• Experience where software and physical infrastructure teams had to stay tightly aligned, and where the software could not paper over the hardware.

• Exposure to building higher-level services on top of an infrastructure platform.

• Experience leading an organization under ISO 27001 or SOC 2 obligations, with the evidence built into engineering practice rather than around it.

• A view on how AI-assisted development changes engineering throughput, and experience scaling that across an organization rather than leaving it to individuals.

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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.