Senior Lead Engineer – Cloud Platform, DevOps & Site Reliability

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General Summary:

Role Summary

We are seeking a highly experienced and technically strong Senior Lead Engineer - Cloud Platform, DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to drive the architecture, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of mission-critical cloud services within the IoT organization.

In this role, you will lead the design and operation of large-scale distributed systems, drive modernization initiatives, influence architecture decisions, and establish engineering best practices across multiple teams. You will partner with development, quality engineering, product management, and operations teams to build highly available, secure, resilient, and scalable cloud-native platforms.

The ideal candidate has deep expertise in cloud technologies, Kubernetes, observability, automation, infrastructure as code, incident management, and production operations, with a proven track record of leading complex projects and mentoring engineers.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical leadership and architectural guidance for highly scalable cloud-native platforms and services.
• Drive strategic initiatives focused on reliability, performance, security, automation, and operational excellence.
• Lead design reviews, architecture discussions, and technology evaluations.
• Mentor and coach engineers across multiple teams, fostering engineering excellence and best practices.
• Partner with stakeholders to define long-term platform and infrastructure roadmaps.

Cloud & Platform Engineering

• Architect, develop, and operate cloud infrastructure across Azure and/or AWS environments.
• Define infrastructure standards and governance through Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Lead cloud migration, modernization, and platform optimization initiatives.
• Ensure compliance with security, regulatory, and operational requirements.
• Optimize cloud infrastructure costs through FinOps principles and resource governance.

DevOps & Automation

• Drive CI/CD strategy and platform engineering initiatives across multiple products.
• Build and maintain secure, scalable, and automated deployment pipelines.
• Promote automation-first approaches for infrastructure provisioning, remediation, testing, and operational workflows.
• Champion GitOps, configuration management, and infrastructure automation practices.

Reliability, Performance & Scalability

• Lead capacity planning, scalability assessments, performance benchmarking, and load testing activities.
• Drive root cause analysis and preventive actions for production issues.
• Conduct chaos engineering exercises to improve system resilience.
• Establish performance and reliability standards across engineering teams.

Collaboration & Communication

• Work closely with engineering leadership, architects, product teams, and customers to align technology solutions with business objectives.
• Communicate technical strategies, risks, operational status, and recommendations to senior leadership.
• Influence organizational best practices for cloud operations, security, and software delivery.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE experience.
• 5+ years of experience leading large-scale cloud platform or infrastructure initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional engineering teams and driving technical strategy.

Technical Requirements

Cloud Technologies

• Expert-level experience with Azure and/or AWS.
• Deep understanding of compute, networking, storage, identity, security, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Experience designing and operating enterprise-scale cloud platforms.

Containerization & Platform Engineering

• Strong expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and cloud-native ecosystems.
• Experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd.
• Experience building multi-cluster and multi-region deployment architectures.

Infrastructure as Code & Automation

• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Pulumi, ARM/Bicep, or CloudFormation.
• Strong automation and scripting skills using Python, Bash, Go, or similar languages.
• Experience implementing GitOps using tools such as ArgoCD or Flux.

CI/CD & DevOps

• Extensive experience with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI/CD, or similar platforms.
• Expertise in deployment automation, release management, and software delivery pipelines.
• Strong understanding of SDLC, DevSecOps, and shift-left practices.

Observability & Reliability

• Expertise in monitoring, logging, and observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog.
• Experience defining and implementing SLI/SLO frameworks.
• Strong troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and operational excellence mindset.

Systems & Networking

• Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Deep understanding of networking fundamentals, DNS, load balancing, CDN, network security, and distributed systems.
• Experience with large-scale production environments supporting mission-critical workloads.

Databases & Distributed Systems

• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases.
• Knowledge of distributed systems design, scalability patterns, caching, messaging, and event-driven architectures.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in large-scale SaaS, IoT, Telecom, CPS, or distributed cloud platforms.
• Experience building highly available global services supporting millions of users/devices.
• Knowledge of FinOps methodologies and cloud cost optimization.
• Experience with security compliance frameworks and cloud governance.
• Azure Solutions Architect, Azure DevOps Engineer, AWS Professional, Kubernetes (CKA/CKS), or equivalent certifications.
• Experience driving platform modernization and engineering transformation initiatives.

Leadership Expectations

• Serve as a technical leader and trusted advisor across the organization.
• Drive engineering excellence, innovation, and operational maturity.
• Influence architecture and technology strategy across multiple programs.
• Develop and mentor future technical leaders.
• Champion reliability, scalability, automation, and customer-first engineering culture.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 8+ years of Software Engineering or related experience.

OR

• Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 5+ years of Software Engineering or related experience.

OR

• PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 5+ years of Software Engineering or related experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with programming languages such as Python, Java, Go, C++, or similar.
• 5+ years of experience designing and operating cloud-native distributed systems.
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives spanning multiple teams and organizations.

Minimum Qualifications:

OR

Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 1+ year of Software Engineering or related work experience.

OR

PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.

• 2+ years of academic or work experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Java, Python, etc.

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