Engineering Manager, Data Center Operations

Location: Hybrid; data center sites across the United States, with regular travel and more frequent on-site presence during builds. Applicants reaching the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a hirify.global office or hub.

Company

hirify.global operates a global network that protects and accelerates Internet applications for customers ranging from individual bloggers to Fortune 500 companies.

What you will do

• Build, lead, and develop a geographically distributed team of Data Center Engineers across US sites, including a 24x7 on-call model, coverage standards, handovers, and incident SLAs.
• Own greenfield site delivery from readiness and hardware delivery through rack-and-stack, cabling, validation, and production handoff, coordinating vendors, contractors, integrators, and colocation partners.
• Run production operations for hardware availability, break/fix, repairs, RMAs, spares, provider escalations, remote hands, power, cooling, and contractual performance.
• Maintain accurate DCIM records for racks, power, cabling, assets, and lifecycle status from hardware arrival through decommissioning.
• Own secure decommissioning, including unracking, physical collection, serial verification, chain of custody, ITAD coordination, destruction certificates, and audit evidence.
• Improve operational scale through tooling and AI-assisted workflows, while reporting availability, build progress, incidents, and operational health to leadership and partnering with network, systems, hardware, supply chain, and infrastructure teams.

Requirements

• 6+ years in data center operations, including 3+ years directly managing on-site technical teams and experience leading geographically distributed teams.
• Experience operating multi-site data center fleets at hyperscale or large-cloud scale, including sites across the full lifecycle: greenfield builds, steady-state operations, and hardware decommissioning.
• Hands-on experience with servers, network devices, optics, cabling, physical connectivity, and sufficient technical depth to coach engineers and assess vendor and contractor work.
• Experience managing providers in Tier III+ colocation facilities and holding vendors accountable to contractual commitments.
• Experience managing 24x7 on-call operations and incident escalation.
• Strong Layer 1 and Layer 2 fundamentals, including structured cabling, fiber and optics, patching standards, switching basics, and troubleshooting physical connectivity.
• Solid knowledge of data center power and cooling, rack design, high-density deployments, hardware lifecycle management, DCIM, and asset management systems.
• Working knowledge of enterprise data center security and compliance frameworks, including physical access controls and chain of custody.
• Strong program management across multiple vendors, sites, and time-bound workstreams, plus a record of reducing toil through tooling or process redesign.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including business reviews and status, risk, and availability reporting to leadership; ability to travel regularly to data center sites.

Nice to have

• Experience establishing a new data center operations function or region from zero.
• Background at a hyperscaler, cloud provider, major CDN, or similarly fast-scaling infrastructure company.
• Experience with ITAD vendor programs, secure destruction requirements, remote-hands programs, and vendor scorecards.
• Experience with PagerDuty or similar on-call and incident tooling.
• Familiarity with NetBox, Nlyte, Jira-based operational workflows, and Confluence documentation practices.
• Background in hardware diagnostics, burn-in, or automated build validation.

Culture & Benefits

• Builder-oriented culture emphasizing curiosity, iteration, ownership, and practical problem-solving.
• Mission focused on protecting and improving the free and open Internet.
• AI is used as a partner for faster delivery, incident triage, root-cause analysis, documentation, and compliance evidence generation.
• Equal employment opportunity and reasonable accommodations are provided.

Hiring process

• Applicants progressing to the offer stage may be asked to attend an in-person interview at a hirify.global office or hub.
• An offer may be conditioned on authorization to receive technology controlled under US export laws without sponsorship for an export license.