Devops Lead

Role Overview

We are seeking a hands-on DevOps Lead to provide technical leadership for the design, automation and 24x7 operation of enterprise Kubernetes, database and DevOps tooling environments across multiple geographic regions. The role combines deep engineering expertise with day-to-day team leadership. The successful candidate will improve platform reliability, delivery velocity, security and operational discipline while remaining directly engaged in architecture, automation, troubleshooting and complex incident resolution.

Key Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Team Enablement

 Lead, mentor and provide technical direction to DevOps engineers; raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, pairing and structured knowledge sharing.  Own technical decisions within the DevOps domain and translate business priorities into an actionable platform roadmap and engineering backlog.  Act as the senior escalation point for complex production issues, while building team capability so knowledge and operational ownership do not remain concentrated with individuals.  Partner with application, teams to remove delivery and reliability bottlenecks. Kubernetes & Platform Operations  Lead the, administration and lifecycle management of production Kubernetes platforms across on-premises.  Ensure platform availability, scalability, capacity, performance and security.  Drive cluster patching, certificate management, backup, restore, and readiness with documented and regularly tested procedures.  Establish standards for workload scheduling, resource requests and limits, health probes, autoscaling, ingress, storage, networking, secrets and configuration management. CI/CD, GitOps & Automation  Design, standardize and optimize CI/CD pipelines that enable repeatable releases.  Automate provisioning, deployment, validation, patching, compliance checks and routine operational tasks to reduce manual effort and failure risk.  Define reusable pipeline templates, quality gates, rollback mechanisms and deployment strategies such as rolling, blue-green and canary releases. Incident Management  Lead major incident response, technical triage and stakeholder communication; ensure blameless post incident reviews produce owned, time-bound corrective actions.  Reduce alert noise, recurring failures, mean time to detect and mean time to restore through problem management, automation and reliability engineering. DevOps Lead - Job Description | 1 Database & Middleware Enablement DEVOPS | TALENT ACQUISITION  Partner with DBAs and application teams to operate reliable database and middleware services, including replication, capacity and performance monitoring.  Support platform integration for technologies such as PostgreSQL and Redis distributed data services.  Ensure stateful workloads have appropriate storage, availability, recovery and operational safeguards. Performance, Capacity & Continuous Improvement  Analyze platform utilization, growth trends and performance constraints; recommend capacity, architecture and configuration improvements.  Define meaningful operational KPIs and provide concise reporting on availability, incidents, deployment performance, risk, technical debt and improvement progress.  Evaluate tools and vendors based on security, reliability, supportability, interoperability, operational effort and total cost of ownership.

Required Qualifications & Experience

 Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.  10+ years of progressive experience in DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering or production operations.  At least 4 years of hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in business-critical production environments, including upgrades and complex troubleshooting.  Proven experience technically leading engineers, coordinating work across teams and owning delivery of platform or reliability initiatives.  Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills, including process, CPU, memory, disk, filesystem and network analysis.  Strong understanding of containers and runtimes, Kubernetes networking, ingress, DNS, storage, scheduling, security and workload lifecycle.  Hands-on expertise with CI/CD, Git, scripting and automation using Bash, Python or a comparable language.  Practical experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration tools such as Terraform, Ansible and Helm.  Experience with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Loki, Datadog or equivalent.  Working knowledge of relational and/or distributed databases, including availability, backup and recovery, replication, monitoring and performance concepts.  Demonstrated experience in incident management, root-cause analysis, disaster recovery and production change governance.  Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain technical risk, trade-offs and priorities to engineering and leadership stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

 Experience supporting large-scale, highly available platforms across multiple regions or data centres.  Hands-on exposure to on-premises Kubernetes distributions such as Rancher RKE2, Red Hat OpenShift or equivalent.  Knowledge of service mesh, FinOps and platform engineering practices.  Experience working in regulated, telecom, financial services or similarly high-availability environments.