Associate Vice President of Engineering Operations and Productivity

Calix is seeking an Associate Vice President of Engineering Operations and Productivity — a true "rockstar" who will be the driving force behind the speed, quality, and effectiveness of our global engineering organization. This critical leadership role is responsible for the tools, processes, infrastructure, and metrics that empower thousands of engineers to deliver world-class products seamlessly and at scale.

This is a strategic, high-impact position for an executive who understands that Dev Productivity is a product and leverages data and automation to treat engineering as a highly optimized manufacturing pipeline.

Key Responsibilities:

Software Development Lifecycle Management:

• Architect and standardize the global CI/CD pipelines, driving automation from code commit to production deployment.
• Direct the strategy for Code Repository Management, including the implementation and governance of the enterprise Branching Strategy (e.g., GitFlow, Trunk-Based Development) to ensure clean, compliant, and efficient Code Movement.
• Implement and manage the infrastructure for Artifact Management (e.g., binary repositories, dependency caching) to ensure repeatable and traceable builds.
• Oversee the creation and sign-off of official Release Bills of Materials (BOMs) and configuration specifications for all product releases, ensuring auditability and compliance.
• Streamline Ticket Management processes (within Jira/Atlassian) to maximize efficiency and minimize overhead for engineering and product teams.

Engineering Strategy and Infrastructure:

• Define and execute the long-term strategic roadmap for Engineering Operations, Developer Experience (DevEx), and Productivity across the Products organization.
• Own and manage all aspects of the on-prem Developer Infrastructure, Cloud environments, networking services, and critical Build Infrastructure that underpins all development activity.
• Provide deep technical expertise and leadership in Cloud and Networking domains to ensure our development and testing environments are resilient, scalable, and cost-optimized.

Productivity, Data Analytics, and Evangelism:

• Establish and champion a proactive, data-driven culture around engineering efficiency, acting as an Evangelist for new tools and methodologies.
• Define, track, and report on key Engineering Productivity Measurements (e.g., Cycle Time, Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Code Churn, MTTR), turning raw data into actionable insights.
• Leverage Data Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) tools to surface actionable insights, identify bottlenecks, and measure the ROI of productivity investments.
• Cultivate an Innovation Mindset within the Engineering Operations teams, constantly seeking and piloting disruptive technologies and processes to dramatically improve engineering velocity and quality.

Service Delivery and Technical Program Management:

• Act as the primary service provider to Engineering, Test, and Product leadership, ensuring their operational needs are met with high quality.
• Oversee the Release Engineering and Technical Program Management (TPM) function, ensuring smooth, predictable, and high-quality software releases across all products.
• Build and maintain strong partnerships with Engineering VPs, advocating for their needs while ensuring organizational consistency and adherence to global SDLC best practices.

Security Assurance and Integrated Security Testing

• Lead the Engineering Security Scan Teams: Directly manage and provide strategic leadership for the teams responsible for running and analyzing security scans within the SDLC (e.g., Static Application Security Testing - SAST, Dynamic Application Security Testing - DAST, and Software Composition Analysis - SCA).
• DevSecOps Integration: Own the implementation and enforcement of the SecDevOps strategy, ensuring security controls and automated scanning are integrated seamlessly into the CI/CD pipelines without creating significant friction or slowing down developer velocity.
• Vulnerability Remediation Process: Establish clear, measurable, and efficient processes for vulnerability reporting, triage, assignment, and tracking through to resolution, treating remediation as a core aspect of developer productivity.
• Compliance Automation Support: Partner with Compliance and Legal teams to automate checks and evidence collection for regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA) directly within the engineering infrastructure and release BOMs.
• Security Gates: Define and enforce necessary security quality gates within the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring no code is promoted to production that fails required security standards.

Technical Oversight:

• Ensure best practices in coding, testing, and software design are followed.
• Conduct code and architecture reviews to ensure robust, scalable, and maintainable systems.
• Advocate for continuous learning and technical excellence within the team.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of progressive experience in Engineering Leadership, with a significant portion dedicated to Engineering Operations, Productivity, or Developer Infrastructure.
• 5+ years of experience at the Director or VP level managing globally distributed teams and highly complex Product Development environments.
• Mastery of the Software Factory: Deep, demonstrated experience designing and managing Build Infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, Code Movement, Artifact Management, and Release BOMs at massive scale.
• Expertise in Dev Tools & SDLC: Hands-on executive knowledge of Dev infrastructure and extensive experience managing and optimizing the Atlassian Suite and defining Branching Strategy and Ticket Management best practices.
• Proven expertise in running and integrating Security Scan teams (SAST, DAST, SCA) and establishing a mature SecDevOps practice.
• Data-Driven Focus: Demonstrated success in using data, metrics, and BI to implement and track meaningful Engineering Productivity Measurements.
• Domain Expertise: Proven track record with scalable Cloud Architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and complex enterprise Networking environments.
• Cultural Leader: A proven Evangelist and champion for change, capable of instilling an Innovation Mindset across engineering organizations.
• Strong understanding of microservices, and Cloud Infrastructure Management. 
• Strong understanding of various components of data center architecture for self-hosted tools.
• Advanced knowledge of the software development and release management lifecycle for a multi-product global company.

Preferred Skills:

• Knowledge of DevOps principles and CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
• Proven ability to multi-task, prioritize, and work under deadlines.
• Experience in managing geographically distributed teams.
• Financial and Business acumen
• SRE principles and Observability
• Automation and AI

The base pay range for this position varies based on the geographic location. More information about the pay range specific to candidate location and other factors will be shared during the recruitment process. Individual pay is determined based on location of residence and multiple factors, including job-related knowledge, skills and experience.

San Francisco Bay Area: