DevOps & SRE Lead

At Syngenta, our goal is to build the most collaborative and trustworthy team in agriculture, providing top-quality seeds and innovative crop protection solutions that improve farmers' success. To support this mission, Syngenta’s IT & Digital team is seeking a Engineering Lead - Data & Analytics in Pune. This role will support the delivery for leading data and engineering teams within our Data Mesh platform, oversee product delivery, and spearhead the modernization of our AI, BI, and agentic analytics solutions.

Role purpose

• The DevOps & SRE Lead is responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, security, and operational excellence of enterprise data and AI platforms and applications.
• This role combines hands-on technical leadership with site reliability practices, enabling high-quality delivery through automation, observability, and strong operational governance.
• The role leads DevOps and SRE practices across platforms, works closely with data engineering teams, AI/ML, and product teams, and establishes standards that enable teams to build and run reliable systems at scale.

Knowledge, experience & capabilities

DevOps & Platform Engineering

• Lead the design, implementation, and evolution of CI/CD pipelines.
• Define and enforce DevOps standards, tooling, and best practices.
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code and environment consistency across QA, staging, and production.
• Partner with application, data, and AI teams to embed DevOps practices early in development.

Site Reliability Engineering

• Own platform reliability, availability, performance, and scalability.
• Define and monitor SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and reliability KPIs.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Drive proactive reliability engineering through automation and observability.

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Own cloud platform operations (AWS preferred).
• Ensure secure, cost-efficient, and resilient cloud infrastructure.
• Drive platform upgrades, patching, and lifecycle management.
• Collaborate with security teams on IAM, network security, and compliance.

Observability & Operations

• Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and tracing frameworks.
• Ensure high signal-to-noise operational alerts.
• Continuously improve MTTR, system stability, and operational maturity.

Leadership & Governance

• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to DevOps/SRE engineers.
• Define operating models, on-call processes, and support structures.
• Work with Product Owners and Architects on roadmap planning.
• Act as escalation point for platform and reliability issues.

Skills

•  CI/CD: GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Jenkins
•  Cloud: AWS / Azure / GCP (strong in at least one)
•  Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM
•  Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
•  Observability: CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
•  Scripting: Python, Bash (or equivalent)

Critical success factors & key challenges

• Platform uptime and reliability metrics (SLOs).
• Domain team adoption rate of the self-serve platform.
• Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Recovery (MTTR) for platform incidents.
• Strong ownership mindset
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills
• Ability to balance speed, stability, and governance

Qualification & Experience

• B.tech/M.tech grad
• 10-12+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering roles
• 3+ years in a technical lead or senior ownership role
• Experience supporting production-critical platforms at scale

Innovations

Employee may, as part of his/her role and maybe through multifunctional teams, participate in the creation and design of innovative solutions. In this context, Employee may contribute to inventions, designs, other work product, including know-how, copyrights, software, innovations, solutions, and other intellectual assets.