Head of Cloud Infastructure

Head of Cloud Engineering

About Niobium

Niobium Microsystems is unlocking the full potential of sensitive data without compromising privacy.

We believe organizations shouldn't have to choose between data security and data utility. The Niobium Encrypted Cloud is a high-performance Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to make encrypted computation easier, faster, and practical for real-world applications. By leveraging our custom accelerators within a cloud environment, we enable customers to process their most proprietary information while it remains fully encrypted. With Niobium, data is never decrypted, never exposed, and never vulnerable—allowing you to compute with confidence.

Founded as a 2021 spinout from Galois, Inc., a world-class security and computing systems research and development company, Niobium’s team combines decades of experience in advanced semiconductor design with a record of delivering world class solutions.

About This Role

We are seeking a Head of Cloud Engineering to architect, build, and deploy the initial instance of the Niobium Encrypted Cloud.

This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership role. You will be the primary architect responsible for integrating our proprietary hardware into a scalable cloud environment. You will effectively act as the "Founding Engineer" for our cloud vertical—starting with a hands-on focus on the backend, frontend, and infrastructure, and transitioning to hiring and leading a team of dozens as we scale from initial pilots to thousands of enterprise users.

Responsibilities

• Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure
  • Architect the Hybrid Cloud: Design and build the Niobium IaaS platform, seamlessly integrating our on-premise proprietary FPGA (and eventually ASIC) clusters with public hyperscalers like AWS and Google Cloud.
  • Hardware Integration: orchestrate the provisioning of bare-metal hardware and accelerated compute instances, ensuring customers can transparently select between CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC backends.
  • Automated Provisioning: Build the "Push Button" infrastructure to automatically deploy isolated client/server VMs and accelerate FHE workloads.
• Platform & Tooling Development
  • Customer Console & UX: Lead the development of the customer-facing web console for account creation, hardware provisioning, and real-time analytics (accuracy, throughput, utilization).
  • Developer Experience (DX): Design and implement standard IaaS tools, including a robust CLI and SDKs, enabling customers to manage keys, launch demonstrations, and integrate Niobium into their existing stacks.
  • Key Management: Implement secure workflows for customers to generate and control their own encryption keys, ensuring Niobium never has access to decrypted data.
• Leadership & Scaling
  • Build the Team: Initially lead backend and frontend engineering efforts, then hire and manage a multi-disciplinary team (Backend, Frontend, DevOps, Customer Support) to support growth from 5 pilot users to thousands of concurrent users.
  • Security & Compliance: Ensure the infrastructure meets enterprise-grade standards from day one, preparing the platform for HIPAA, SOC2, and GDPR compliance.

Required Technical Expertise

• Senior Cloud Architect: Deep experience building IaaS, PaaS, or complex distributed systems. You know how to marry bare-metal hardware with virtualized cloud services.
• Full-Stack Leadership: You are comfortable "wearing all the hats", writing the initial backend code, setting up the frontend console, and handling DevOps.
• Hardware/HPC Fluency: Experience with FPGA integration, GPU acceleration, or High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments is highly desirable.
• Security-First Mindset: Understanding of encryption standards, key management systems (KMS), and secure compute enclaves.
• Startup Agility: You can execute "push button" deployment for immediate customer demos while simultaneously planning the roadmap for a robust, global-scale architecture.

Location

Niobium is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Employees are primarily located coast to coast across the U.S. This role is a remote position and we are seeking a candidate that lives near an ideal data center location (like Texas, central Washington, and Iowa) so that the data center can be co-located with the cloud lead and other cloud employees.

Benefits

Niobium offers a highly competitive benefits program to support employees and their families, including:

• Competitive salaries 
• Equity in the form of Incentive Stock Options (ISO)
• Employer paid medical insurance plan
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contributions
• Dental and vision reimbursement account (HRA)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Flexible work location with remote options
• Flexible time off