Technical Lead, Cloud

<h3><strong>About Aiven</strong></h3> <p>At Aiven, our vision is to help developers and builders bring their ideas to life with speed and simplicity by providing a data platform that makes open-source infrastructure easily accessible to everyone. We are now embarking on our most ambitious strategic bet: building a new cloud offering for the agentic era, a ground-up effort built on open-source principles.</p> <h3><strong>The Role</strong></h3> <p>We are looking for a Technical Lead, Cloud to own the technical execution of this new product. This is a clean-slate build, you will take us from zero to a production-grade cloud running on bare metal and iterating rapidly toward a full AI-era cloud platform.</p> <p>This is a small but ambitious team with minimal hierarchy and high autonomy. You are the technical leader of this team i.e. the person who translates vision into architecture, infrastructure and shipped product. The VP Strategy (Ville Lehto) acts as the overall leader of this initiative, setting the strategic direction and owns the business outcomes. Together, you form the leadership pair that makes this thing real.</p> <h3><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></h3> <p><strong>Technical Architecture & Decision-Making</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own the end-to-end technical architecture for the cloud. From the management plane to the developer and agent-facing experience layer</li> <li>Make the critical build/buy/partner decisions for different layers of the stack (like object storage, inference, auth) and align trade-offs with VP Strategy for bets that carry strategic or financial weight</li> <li>Design for the future from day one: ensure the architecture supports the bold long term vision and strategy that you are expected contribute to</li> </ul> <p><strong>Execution & Delivery</strong></p> <ul> <li>Build a high-performance, “no-ego” team of exceptional engineers and product builders</li> <li>Lead the engineering team (backend engineers, frontend, design, architect) with a relentless bias for shipping while contributing code yourself</li> <li>Own the roadmap and delivery milestones</li> <li>Operate with disciplined scoping and ruthless prioritisation, launch with what matters, proxy what can wait, and never let perfection block progress</li> <li>Work together with Aiven teams to ensure no misalignment emerges over shared architecture</li> </ul> <p><strong>Infrastructure & Operations</strong></p> <ul> <li>Ensure the platform meets the rigorous security, compliance and certification requirements</li> <li>Evaluate and plan for the transition from rented bare metal to owned data centre infrastructure as demand scales</li> </ul> <p><strong>Cross-functional Partnership</strong></p> <ul> <li>Partner with the Head of Public Policy to ensure our moat around sovereignty is reflected in the technology choices</li> <li>Work with the Marketing Lead to arm go-to-market with credible technical narratives</li> <li>Engage directly with design-partner customers to validate requirements and iterate on the MVP</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Who you are</strong></h3> <p>You are a principal-level engineer with the ability to operate in an early product environment like a founder. You have built and shipped complex infrastructure products, ideally cloud platforms, managed database services or developer tooling. You know what it takes to go from a blank canvas to paying customers in a short timeline.</p> <p>You have deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and open-source technologies. Y