Lead Engineer - Cloud Operations
First seen by Alion on Nov 4, 2026.
Lead Engineer
Woolworths Group India is partnering exclusively with Zinnov Group to recruit for this position.
About this role
The Lead Engineer is a hands-on, AI-focused technical leader. They own Tier-3 (L3) support for engineering solutions, including data pipelines and Vertex AI use cases on Google Cloud, lead the Cloud Ops team and use Claude and Gemini directly in their daily work. The role focuses on three outcomes:
- Run: Keep production stable, available and cost-efficient across applications, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines and AI workloads.
- Improve: Remove recurring failures through problem management, automation and hands-on use of AI tools such as Claude and Gemini.
- Grow: Own the team's technical L3 capability and build it through mentoring, cross-training, runbooks and structured learning.
What you'll do
- Own L3 production support across applications, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines and Vertex AI workloads, handling P1/P2 incidents, escalations, debugging, service recovery and RCA.
- Drive production reliability and problem management through monitoring, observability, incident prevention, corrective actions, SLAs/SLOs, ITIL processes and ServiceNow.
- Own GCP data pipeline operations, including batch/streaming ETL/ELT, Cloud Composer/Airflow, BigQuery and Cloud Storage.
- Manage Vertex AI production workloads, including pipelines, training jobs, model registry, batch/online endpoints and Gemini integrations.
- Demonstrate hands-on AI-assisted engineering using Claude, Claude Code and Gemini for debugging, code reviews, log analysis, test/script generation, documentation, AI agents, automation and prompt engineering.
- Lead Cloud Ops and DevOps across GCP and Kubernetes/GKE, Cloud Run, Compute Engine, networking, IAM, Terraform/IaC, Git, CI/CD, containers, configuration management and deployment automation.
- Provide strong hands-on technical expertise in Python, SQL and shell scripting, monitoring/observability tools (Cloud Monitoring, Splunk, Snyk).
- Lead and develop a 78-member Cloud Ops team, owning L3 capability mapping, mentoring, cross-training, on-call/shift management, hiring support and knowledge sharing.
- Own technical delivery and stakeholder management, including code/design reviews, release and change management, operational readiness, risk assessment and collaboration with Engineering, Product, Platform, Security and business teams.
- Drive operational excellence and continuous improvement through automation, runbooks, technical debt reduction, SLO/SLA adherence, MTTD/MTTR, incident trends, change failure rates, cloud cost optimisation and service performance reporting.
Tech Stack:
- Cloud: GCP, Kubernetes (GKE), Compute Engine, Cloud Run, networking, IAM and Cloud Storage.
- Data Engineering: BigQuery, Cloud Composer/Airflow, ETL/ELT, data modelling, data quality and reconciliation.
- AI/ML Platforms: Vertex AI Pipelines, endpoints, model registry, Gemini on Vertex AI and production AI workload management.
- AI-assisted Engineering: Hands-on Claude, Claude Code and Gemini; prompt engineering, AI agents, automation, guardrails and model evaluation.
- Infrastructure & DevOps: Terraform/IaC, Git, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation and configuration management.
- Production Operations & SRE: L3 support, incident/problem management, RCA, SLOs, on-call management, capacity planning and disaster recovery.
- Monitoring & ITSM Tools: Google Cloud Monitoring, Splunk, Snyk, observability tools and ServiceNow.
- Programming & Scripting: Strong hands-on Python, SQL and Shell scripting.
What you'll experience
- Be a part of Australia's largest retailer
- Constant mentoring and training provided
- Generous performance based bonus
- 20 days annual leave
- A flexible approach to work
- Premium insurance coverage for you and your dependants
Everyone belongs at Woolworths Group
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are key to realising our purpose of better together for a better tomorrow. We encourage all candidates to apply; please let us know in your application if we can support you with any adjustments in the hiring process.
Your Personal Data
By submitting your application, you acknowledge and consent to Zinnov Management Consulting Private Limited and its subsidiaries (Zinnov) and/or Woolworths Group Limited and its subsidiaries (Woolworths Group) collecting, processing and disclosing your personal information for the purposes of managing the recruitment process.
Skills
Site Reliability, DevOps, BigQuery, Python, Kubernetes, Terraform, Vertex AI, SQL, CI/CD, Shell Scripting, Splunk