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THE ROLE:
You will serve as the technical program leader for large-scale compute clusters across their full lifecycle. That spans bring-up and delivery through sustained operation and administration. You will lead the engineering and operations teams that deliver clusters on schedule, then keep them healthy, available, and efficiently utilized in production. You will drive the processes and execution rhythms that turn build plans into operational environments, and the discipline that keeps them running. Success requires strong analytical, problem-solving, and risk-management skills. You must also build effective relationships and drive alignment across a complex, fast-moving engineering organization. You must be self-directed and comfortable operating in dynamic environments with cross-functional dependencies and live production constraints.
THE PERSON:
As the Cluster Build and Operations Program Manager, you are the accountable leader for the cluster from concept through delivery and into steady-state service. You partner with engineering teams to define build strategies, assess technical feasibility, sequence dependencies, and drive execution against program objectives. Once clusters are live, you own the operating model and the escalation paths that keep workloads running. When issues arise - during bring-up or in production - you lead cross-functional triage, push investigations to root cause, and ensure resolution through closure. The ideal candidate has delivered and operated complex hardware and software programs, and thrives in matrixed organizations. That record includes predictable, on-time delivery and dependable day-to-day operation of business-critical infrastructure. This is a program leadership role rather than a hands-on engineering or site reliability position. You are accountable for the plan, the operating cadence, and the outcome, and you drive the specialist teams who perform the technical work.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Build and Delivery
- Lead cluster bring-up - from concept and planning through delivery and operational handoff.
- Direct and coordinate cross-functional teams across hardware, infrastructure, software, firmware, validation, and site/datacenter operations.
- Assess technical feasibility with software and hardware architects, technical leads, and engineering teams, clarifying requirements and dependencies.
- Develop integrated program schedules covering hardware, firmware, software, infrastructure, and bring-up dependencies, and align milestones to delivery objectives.
- Lead bring-up debug by triaging blockers, convening subject-matter experts, and driving fixes to closure before production handoff.
- Build, maintain, and execute program plans, including plans of record (the agreed baseline), statements of work, schedules, scope, budgets, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Define and enforce the acceptance criteria and exit gates a cluster must meet before it is released from bring-up into production service.
Operations
- Own cluster availability and utilization targets in production, report performance against them, and hold the responsible engineering and operations teams accountable.
- Establish and run the operating cadence for the fleet, including maintenance windows, change management, firmware and software update campaigns, and scheduled downtime planning.
- Establish and manage on-call rotation and escalation coverage, including hand-off procedures, severity definitions, and response-time expectations.
- Lead production issue response, run post-incident reviews, and track preventive actions to closure.
- Partner with datacenter and site operations on power, cooling, cabling, spares, Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) flow, and field service.
- Direct capacity planning and lifecycle management across the fleet - expansion, re-provisioning, hardware refresh, and decommission.
- Define the monitoring and reporting leadership needs to manage the fleet, and work with engineering to close gaps.
Administration
- Oversee cluster administration, including workload scheduling and queue policy, node and partition configuration, image and software stack management, and onboarding of new user teams.
- Govern access, entitlement, and quota management across teams and workloads, in partnership with security and IT.
- Establish and maintain the runbooks, standard operating procedures, and operational documentation that make cluster administration repeatable and transferable.
- Define and track support expectations for cluster users, and manage the intake and prioritization of user-facing operational requests.
Across the Lifecycle
- Provide clear executive and operational visibility into build status and fleet health while facilitating dependency management and communication across teams.
- Anticipate risks throughout the lifecycle, identify mitigation strategies, and proactively address issues to protect schedules, availability, and engineering resources.
- Partner with core and execution teams to identify areas needing escalation, and see them resolved.
- Collect, analyze, organize, and publish build and operational performance data through dashboards, metrics, and recurring status reviews.
- Drive continuous improvement of build, operations, and administration processes, tools, and automation to increase throughput, repeatability, and operational efficiency.
- Work effectively with senior leaders across Engineering, Product Management, Customer Engineering, IT, and Program Management to align on priorities, risks, and objectives.
PREFERRED EXPERIENCE:
- Experience with artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC) cluster builds, and with programs that carry clusters into sustained production operation.
- Working familiarity with cluster administration - workload schedulers such as Slurm or Kubernetes, node provisioning and imaging, fabric and interconnect health, and fleet monitoring.
- Depth sufficient to lead technical discussions and judge trade-offs, not to administer the cluster directly.
- Experience establishing or managing operational disciplines such as incident and change management, maintenance planning, on-call coverage, and post-incident review.
- Detail-oriented and self-motivated, with a strong sense of accountability and pride in delivering results through cross-functional teams.
- Proven ability to lead and coordinate cross-functional technical teams through complex, multi-stage cluster bring-up, integration, or infrastructure deployment efforts.
- Comfortable leading technical debug discussions and guiding engineering teams to root cause.
- Ability to quickly grasp technical concepts and convert meeting discussions into clear, actionable outcomes.
- Excellent organizational, analytical, problem-solving, presentation, written, and verbal communication skills.
- Results-oriented and highly organized, able to manage multiple priorities without losing momentum.
- Builds productive relationships across organizations and operates as a self-starter.
- Demonstrated horizontal leadership and matrix-management experience, with the ability to drive execution without direct authority.
- Strong executive communication skills, including program reviews, status reporting, and escalation management.
- Demonstrated ability to solve complex cross-organizational problems and mitigate risk at program scale.
- People-management experience is desirable.
- Experience in Agile development environments.
- Strong proficiency with project and productivity tools, including Microsoft Project, Jira, Confluence, and Microsoft Office Suite applications.
ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS:
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
- Formal project management education and Project Management Professional (PMP), Scrum Master, or equivalent certification/training.
This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.
Benefits offered are described: AMD benefits at a glance.
AMD does not accept unsolicited resumes from headhunters, recruitment agencies, or fee-based recruitment services. AMD and its subsidiaries are equal opportunity, inclusive employers and will consider all applicants without regard to age, ancestry, color, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, race, religion, political and/or third-party affiliation, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates and will accommodate applicants’ needs under the respective laws throughout all stages of the recruitment and selection process.
AMD may use Artificial Intelligence to help screen, assess or select applicants for this position. AMD’s “Responsible AI Policy” is available here.
This posting is for an existing vacancy.