Platform Engineering Lead

We are looking for a Platform Engineering Lead who has already helped companies move from fast growth to stable, secure, and cost-efficient scale, and can do the same for ZOOP. This role sits at the intersection of engineering velocity, security, reliability, and cost discipline. You will help ZOOP evolve from strong DevOps foundations into a mature platform-led organisation.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Platform and Cloud Architecture:

• Own ZOOP's platform and cloud architecture across GCP / AWS.
• Design opinionated, reusable platform patterns instead of one-off infra.
• Build and evolve ZOOP's Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with: Self-service environments, Golden paths / paved roads, Standardised templates and guardrails.
• Lead Kubernetes and cloud-native adoption at scale.
• Drive infrastructure automation using Terraform, Pulumi or similar IaC tools.

CI/CD, Reliability and Dev Experience:

• Establish strong CI/CD practices with quality gates and production readiness.
• Drive adoption of testing, automation, and safer deployment practices.
• Define and track golden signals, SLIs/SLOs, and incident response processes.
• Reduce operational toil and improve developer productivity.
• Make observability first citizen for any infrastructure using cost-efficient systems.
• Design observability as a stack that multiple teams can add seamlessly into their applications.

Security, Privacy and Compliance:

• Build security-by-default into infrastructure and pipelines.
• Lead implementation and continuous readiness for: DPDP Act (India), ISO 27001:2022 SOC 2 Type II.
• Implement zero-trust principles, least-privilege access, and data isolation.

FinOps and Optimisation:

• Make cloud cost transparent and accountable across teams.
• Set up FinOps practices with budgets, alerts, and optimisation routines.
• Balance build vs buy decisions with clear ROI thinking.

AI, Data and MLOps Foundations:

• Enable secure and scalable ML/MLOps foundations.
• Define guardrails for AI workloads and sensitive data handling.

Leadership and Collaboration:

• Work closely with engineering teams to align infra and product strategy.
• Mentor engineers and guide teams through change.
• Drive long-term initiatives while keeping execution practical.

Expectations:

• Engineering teams ship faster with confidence and guardrails.
• Cloud cost, security, and reliability are predictable, visible, and managed.
• CI/CD is trusted, enforced, and production-ready.
• Platform decisions reduce cognitive load instead of adding process.

Scope and Expectations:

• This is a hands-on leadership role (architecture + implementation).
• You will build, not just review.
• You will own the platform roadmap, not just infrastructure tickets.
• You will work as a force multiplier for product engineering teams, not a bottleneck.

Requirements:

• 6-8+ years building and running production infrastructure.
• Experience scaling platforms at high-growth or regulated companies.
• Strong hands-on background with: Kubernetes & cloud-native ecosystem, Service Mesh & Policy Engines, GCP, AWS and Azure, Terraform / Infrastructure as Code.

Engineering and Operations:

• Solid understanding of SDLC and CI/CD systems (Jenkins or GitOps).
• Experience with observability tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and New Relic.
• Comfortable reading and contributing to systems in Go, Python, or Node.js .

Security and Compliance:

• Practical experience delivering ISO 27001 and SOC 2 controls.
• Strong understanding of data protection, privacy, and access control.

Mindset:

• Bias for action with strong judgment.
• Analytical, cost-aware, and reliability-focused.
• Collaborative, calm under pressure, and open to feedback.
• Comfortable saying no when necessary and explaining why.

Nice to have:

• Experience in fintech, identity, or regulated domains.
• Built internal developer platforms or shared infra tooling.
• Contributions to open-source projects.