Head - SRE

Skillz; Bengaluru; Hybrid; INR 11,428,572 - 15,238,096; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits package

401K matching

Wellness initiatives

Paid time off

Job summary

Skillz is seeking a hands-on engineering leader in Bengaluru, India, to manage Infrastructure and Security. This position will ensure scalability and reliability of infrastructure to support product development. Key responsibilities include leading global teams, managing platform reliability, and advocating for security compliance.

Candidates should have extensive experience in infrastructure engineering and a track record of success in managing cloud environments. This role offers a hybrid work environment that encourages professional growth and collaboration.

Qualifications

• 14+ years of infrastructure engineering experience with public cloud at scale.
• 5+ years of running Kubernetes workloads in production.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the DevOps and SRE functions across locations.
• Own platform SLAs and incident response.
• Partner with product teams for infrastructure architecture reviews.

Skills

AWS expertise

Kubernetes at scale

Observability stack ownership

CI/CD platform ownership

Strong distributed systems fundamentals

Security and compliance fluency

Leadership across global teams

Cost optimisation track record

Clear communication

Job description

Why Skillz

• Culture of Impact: Join a united team of builders, creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs driven by the desire to win. At Skillz, we create value, obsess over our product, and make a difference in the world.

• Comprehensive Benefits: Enjoy peace of mind with our comprehensive benefits package, which includes 100% coverage for medical, dental, and vision expenses for both you and your dependents. Additionally, take advantage of our 401K matching, equity incentives, pre‑tax benefit options, and more.

• Wellness Support: Enhance your well‑being with our array of wellness initiatives, including meditation and mental health resources, physical fitness coaching and classes, family planning assistance, health and parenting guidance, virtual therapy sessions, and more.

• Time off: We offer competitive paid time off (PTO) & company holidays to help you recharge and pursue your passions.

• Las Vegas Headquarters: Skillz strongly believes in a five‑day a week, collaborative office environment at our 36,000+ square foot headquarters. Enjoy free breakfast and catered lunches, snacks, a full‑size gym with showers, commuter benefits, insurance, team bonding events and many more.

• Recognized Success: Skillz has earned recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, CNBC's Disruptor 50, San Francisco Business Times' Best Places to Work, Forbes' Next Billion‑Dollar Startups, and the #1 fastest‑growing company in America on the Inc. 5000 list, and many more.

• Development Opportunities: We hold our employees to high standards while providing them with professional growth opportunities. We operate like a startup, and encourage all of our employees to collaborate and voice feedback about our product and ways we can improve as a business. We believe in never settling, and that also pertains to your growth.

About the Role

We are hiring a hands‑on engineering leader to lead the Infrastructure and Security domain. This role is critical in ensuring our infrastructure can scale with and support product development needs across the company.

This role will:

• Team leadership across time zones. Lead and grow the DevOps and SRE functions across Las Vegas and Bengaluru. Build self‑sustaining pods with clear on‑call ownership and no single points of failure.

• Platform reliability. Own SLAs and incident response end‑to‑end. Drive mean‑time‑to‑detect and mean‑time‑to‑resolve down. Serve as the escalation owner for P0/P1 events.

• Infrastructure architecture reviews. Partner with product engineering teams on system design and architecture decisions. Review proposed architectures for scalability, reliability, and security implications before implementation. Establish a lightweight review process that accelerates rather than gates product delivery.

• Infrastructure cost ownership. Hold the Infra Opex budget. Identify and execute cloud spend reductions (EBS cleanup, right‑sizing, reserved capacity, migration initiatives) targeting $250k+ in annualised savings based on the ROI.

• Developer productivity. Own the CI/CD platform, dev environment tooling, and deployment pipeline reliability. Measurably improve the mean time to deploy for product engineering teams.

• Security and compliance liaison. Partner with Legal and Finance on SOX and PCI DSS obligations. Translate regulatory requirements into infrastructure and application security controls.

• Technical mentorship. Provide day‑to‑day guidance to engineers. Create a culture of operational rigour, blameless post‑mortems, and continuous improvement.

Key Competencies

• Deep AWS expertise — EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, cost tooling (Cost Explorer, Savings Plans)

• Kubernetes at scale — service mesh (Istio), microservices deployment patterns, cluster lifecycle management

• Observability stack ownership — Datadog, Prometheus, distributed tracing (Jaeger/X‑Ray), log aggregation

• CI/CD platform ownership — ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, deployment pipeline reliability

• Strong distributed systems fundamentals — failure mode analysis, SLO design, capacity planning

• Security and compliance fluency — PCI DSS, SOX controls, application security architecture

• Leadership across global teams — asynchronous communication, on‑call design, hiring across time zones

• Demonstrated cost optimisation track record with measurable cloud spend outcomes

• Clear communication with the executive and cross‑functional stakeholders

Experience

• 14+ years of infrastructure engineering experience with public cloud at scale

• 5+ years running Kubernetes workloads in production (EKS preferred)

• Proven track record in building or overhauling observability stacks for large‑scale distributed systems

• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD frameworks (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or equivalent)

• Track record leading infra reliability initiatives with measurable, quantified outcomes

• Comfortable debugging complex distributed systems and reading application code in Go, Python, or Java

• Prior budget ownership or Opex accountability preferred

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, with the ability to effectively engage and influence senior leadership stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Gaming or fintech experience (real‑money, regulated environment preferred)

• Experience working with geographically distributed engineering teams

• Experience building 0→1 teams or standing up functions from scratch

Location: Hybrid in Bengaluru, India

Travel Requirement: Less than 10%

Skillz embraces diversity and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As part of our commitment to diversifying our workforce, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status, and we operate in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.