Lead DevOps Engineer

Job Summary We are seeking a highly experienced Lead DevOps/Platform Engineer to join the technology division of our organization. This role is responsible for the reliability, security, scalability, and engineering excellence of our cloud-native technology platform leveraging various platforms, systems and tooling. You will lead infrastructure design, zero-touch deployment programs, observability and incident response, policy-as-code governance, and developer self-service — while advancing next-generation platform capabilities including governed automation, secure tool integrations for operational workflows, retrieval-augmented operational context, and production-grade evaluation and guardrails for emerging Agentic AI platform use cases. The ideal candidate blends deep platform engineering knowledge with industry best practices, cutting-edge technology trends plus hands-on experience in one or few of latest AI capabilities. This is a technical leadership role: approximately 60% technical ownership, 30% stakeholder management, and 10% people leadership (when applicable). Responsibilities Design, build, and operate cloud-native infrastructure at scale: load balancers, containers, serverless, managed and self-hosted databases, caching, and supporting platform services. Lead Infrastructure-as-Code programs — modular repositories, environment promotion, state strategy, and safe migration from monolithic to per-service or contract-based configurations. Support CI/CD and release engineering including progressive delivery, rollback safety, and reliability gates tied to SLO and error-budget signals. Automate operational workflows with code and event-driven orchestration platforms — emphasizing accuracy, repeatability, compliance, and security. Partner on multi-cloud platform concerns: identity, edge/CDN, secrets management, and mobile telemetry pipelines. Serve as escalation lead for P0/P1 incidents within assigned product POD scope; drive MTTI/MTTR improvement using severity- and complexity-aware measurement. Advance intelligent incident response: contextual alert enrichment, retrieval over runbooks and operational context, schema-validated root-cause analysis, and approval-gated remediation. Own on-call routing hygiene, on-call health, post-mortem closure, and permanent-fix tracking for assigned products. Contribute to product reliability outcomes — feature breakage detection, synthetics, latency SLOs, and observability accuracy. Implement enterprise observability standards: distributed tracing, structured logging, required service tags, and SLO-based alerting. Build operational telemetry for automated and multi-step platform workflows — per-run correlation, failure taxonomy, and anomaly review. Operate secure agent-tool connectivity (e.g., MCP-class protocols) for standardized integration with enterprise APIs and operational systems. Support retrieval-augmented architectures over operational corpora with evaluation harnesses and retrieval drift detection. Security, Compliance & Governance Enforce security-by-default: just-in-time access, IAM least privilege, secrets management, and edge/WAF protections. Implement policy-as-code at pull-request and deploy stages; drive configuration drift detection and closure SLAs. Define permissions, guardrails, and autonomy zones for automated systems — with kill switches and immutable audit logs. Stand up and operate an LLM/AI gateway for policy enforcement, safety scanning, cost attribution, and reliability-gated deployments where applicable. Developer Experience & Platform Product Ownership Treat the platform as a product: self-service catalog, environment stability, and toil reduction. Lead assigned platform engineering initiatives end-to-end — milestones, KPI measurement, stakeholder demos, documentation, and knowledge transfer. Serve as primary liaison to assigned Product PODs: sprint and release planning, SLA negotiation, status reporting, and platform syncs. Develop runbooks, standards, and machine- and human-readable operational documentation. Advanced Platform Capabilities Design and operationalize multi-step automated workflows with explicit human-approval nodes, tool registries, and evaluation-in-CI gates. Build platform APIs that wrap existing CI/CD and IaC operations — enabling safe automation without rip-and-replace. Provision isolated execution environments for automated runs: no standing credentials, default-deny egress, per-run isolation, mandatory evaluation results. Implement model routing and circuit breakers for cost efficiency and provider resilience where LLM-backed workflows are in scope. Promote a governed platform delivery lifecycle with measurable exit criteria at each stage. Leadership & Collaboration Mentor engineers on incident command, IaC standards, observability hygiene, and safe adoption of platform automation. Drive cross-functional alignment with Security and product development using innovative delivery practices and data-driven KPI reviews. Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and knowledge-culture initiatives. Validate system integrity, infrastructure designs, application deployments, and operational processes; recommend improvements. Requirements Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Software Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience). 10+ years as a DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineer, with meaningful software or infrastructure development experience. Production ownership of large, business-critical distributed systems (preferably container-based microservices). Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills — ability to identify issues before they become client-impacting problems. Strong communication skills — explain technical protocols, processes, and decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Prior technical lead or Pod Lead experience supporting multiple product teams. Led platform migrations (IaC refactor, CI/CD modernization, observability uplift) with minimal production disruption. Built production automated workflows with human-in-the-loop gates — not proof-of-concept only. Demonstrated ability to stay current with industry trends, IT operations best practices, and emerging platform technologies.