Infrastructure Lead

DeviceDriven; Thiruvananthapuram; Hybrid; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

DeviceDriven seeks an Infrastructure Lead to own reliability, security and release operations of a large-scale US-based FinTech platform and to lead the offshore engineering team that runs it.

The role combines hands-on platform engineering with team leadership: Terraform, Kubernetes, incident response, change management, and a near-term focus on building a scalable, secure, and auditable infrastructure for 24/7 operations.

Qualifications

• 12–16 years in infrastructure, DevOps, platform or site reliability engineering.
• At least 4 years leading a team of 5+ engineers.
• Breadth across cloud, Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD, Linux, Windows, networking, certificates, observability and security operations.
• Currently hands-on—talk through Terraform written, a recent incident you led, and a release you ran.
• Production ownership of a cloud platform of meaningful scale.
• Experience in a regulated environment (PCI DSS, SOC 2, financial services or equivalent).
• Direct experience working with US-based client leadership and stakeholders.
• Experience building and growing a team through hiring, onboarding and development.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on platform engineering and operations: build, change and decommission cloud infrastructure via Terraform; manage Kubernetes workloads; handle secrets and IAM; environment provisioning; server estate management; automate recurring tasks.
• Lead the infrastructure team: set direction, allocate work, maintain delivery standards and documentation; plan capability building; drive hiring.
• Release execution and change management: oversee end-to-end releases; manage release sequencing across components; operate change management and SDLC controls; coordinate across onshore/offshore hours.
• Reliability and incident response: lead major outages; own root cause analysis; define and track SLOs/SLIs; reduce recurrence.
• Security, compliance and certificate lifecycles: manage TLS/SAML/mTLS keys; vulnerability remediation; PCI DSS and SOC 2 evidence; network security controls; regulated environment boundary.
• Observability and automation: monitor, alerting design; automate patching, renewal and provisioning; AI-assisted tooling usage.

Skills

Terraform

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Linux Administration

Windows Administration

Security Operations

Leadership

Tools

Datadog

Prometheus

GitHub Actions

Ansible

Helm

Job description

Infrastructure Lead

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly experienced Infrastructure Lead to own the reliability, security and release operations of a large-scale US-based FinTech platform, and to lead the offshore engineering team that runs it.

The platform is a sophisticated enterprise FinTech environment: multiple interconnected microservices across payments, loyalty and rewards domains, running on GCP infrastructure with high transaction volumes and 24/7 reliability obligations.

This is a dual role. Technically, you will be the most capable infrastructure engineer on the team writing Terraform, running releases, leading incident response and closing out root cause analyses yourself. As a leader, you will own the function: the team’s structure and capability, the on‑call rota, the change‑approval gate, the standards everyone works to, and the relationship with engineering and client stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

Hands‑on platform engineering and operations

• Build, change and decommission cloud infrastructure through Terraform; manual changes to production are not permitted
• Operate and tune Kubernetes workloads — deployments, scaling, resource configuration, node and cluster health
• Manage secrets, service accounts and IAM across environments, including rotation and least‑privilege review
• Provision and maintain environments — application configuration, database connectivity, storage and messaging
• Own the Linux and Windows server estate: patching cycles, vulnerability remediation, hardening and lifecycle
• Automate recurring work out of existence. Patching, certificate renewal and access provisioning belong in scheduled jobs and self‑service workflows, not in a queue a person works through

Team leadership and people management

• Lead the infrastructure team — set direction, allocate work, and hold the team to a standard of delivery and documentation
• Own capability planning: identify the gaps, build the training, and make sure every critical function has depth behind it
• Drive hiring — define roles, run technical interviews, and build the team as the function grows
• Manage performance directly: set expectations, give feedback, develop strong engineers and address weak delivery early
• Design and run the on‑call rota, with a published escalation policy and proven cover for every critical function
• Deliberately broaden the team. Engineers should grow into adjacent areas rather than settling into single‑tool ownership
• Represent infrastructure to engineering leadership, client stakeholders and audit — including in escalations
• Build and maintain the documentation estate: runbooks, architecture diagrams and escalation paths current enough to be trusted

Release execution and change management

• Execute and oversee releases end to end
• Own release sequencing across database, platform, configuration and version changes
• Operate the change management process — raise, assess and approve production changes
• Hold non‑delegable production change approval as the segregation‑of‑duties control for the function
• Plan and communicate release windows across onshore and offshore hours

Reliability, incident response

• Lead incident response on major outages, co‑ordinating engineering, database and client‑facing teams
• Own the formal root cause analysis process — author the hard ones, review the rest, and sign off corrective actions
• Define and track SLOs, SLIs and error budgets; build the monitoring and alerting that supports them
• Drive down recurring incident classes rather than absorbing them

Security, compliance and certificate lifecycles

• Own the certificate estate end to end — TLS, SAML signing, mTLS and PGP keys — including registrar and DNS management, and automated expiry monitoring
• Remediate infrastructure vulnerabilities to agreed severity SLAs across Linux and Windows
• Own infrastructure evidence for PCI DSS and SOC 2 cycles, ASV scanning and annual penetration testing
• Manage network security controls: firewall rules, allowlisting, VPN, DNS and edge configuration
• Maintain the scope boundary of the regulated payment‑data environment

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 12–16 years in infrastructure, DevOps, platform or site reliability engineering
• At least 4 years leading a team of 5 or more engineers, with direct responsibility for the work, the standards and the people
• Breadth across the whole stack is mandatory. Cloud, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, Linux, Windows, networking, certificates, observability and security operations — you should have personally owned production work in all of these, not managed someone who did
• Currently hands‑on. You should be able to talk through Terraform you have written, an incident you led, and a release you ran in the last few months
• Production ownership of a cloud platform of meaningful scale — multiple environments, multiple applications, real transaction volume
• Experience in a regulated environment — PCI DSS, SOC 2, financial services or equivalent
• Track record of working directly with US‑based client leadership and stakeholders
• Experience building a team — hiring, onboarding and developing engineers, not inheriting a finished one

Technical Skills

Category

Requirements

Cloud platform

Google Cloud Platform — GKE and Anthos, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, IAM and service accounts, Managed Microsoft AD, Artifact Registry, VPC and networking. AWS or Azure depth is acceptable alongside demonstrable GCP capability

Infrastructure as code

Terraform to a professional standard — modules, state management, plan review, drift detection. Ansible or Helm an advantage

Containers and orchestration

Kubernetes in production — workloads, services, ingress, scaling, troubleshooting. Docker. Kustomize or equivalent overlay configuration

CI/CD

Pipeline design and operation — GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI or Jenkins. GitOps patterns, artifact registries, release promotion across environments

Operating systems

Linux administration at depth (RHEL, Ubuntu or CentOS) and Windows Server administration, including Active Directory, patching and hardening

Networking

DNS and registrar management, Cloudflare or equivalent edge and WAF, firewall rules, VPN, load balancing, TLS termination, VPC and subnet design

Certificates and secrets

Full certificate lifecycle including automated issuance and renewal; SAML and mTLS; key stores; secret management and rotation

Observability

Metrics, logging, tracing and synthetic monitoring — Datadog, Prometheus and Grafana or equivalent. Alert design that reduces noise rather than adding to it

Databases (operational)

Operating managed databases — Cloud SQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB. Connectivity, proxying, backup and restore, failover. Not a DBA role, but you must be credible with one

Security operations

Vulnerability management and remediation, patch orchestration, scanning tools, CIS‑style hardening, audit evidence

Scripting

Bash and Python to automation standard; PowerShell for the Windows estate

Leadership Skills

• Proven record of leading an infrastructure or platform team through production ownership at scale
• Able to grow a team deliberately — assess capability honestly, close gaps through training and hiring, and create depth rather than dependence
• Comfortable making and defending production decisions, including refusing a change under pressure from the business
• Strong written English — runbooks, root cause analyses and client‑facing incident communication are a core part of the job
• Credible with senior stakeholders: can explain a risk, a cost or an outage to engineering leadership and to a client without technical theatre
• Sets a standard by example. The team should get better at the work because of how you do it, not only because of what you tell them

AI and Automation

• Active user of AI‑assisted engineering tools in daily work
• Able to apply AI to infrastructure work specifically — generating and reviewing Terraform, drafting root cause analyses from incident timelines, interpreting unfamiliar services, and triaging alert volume
• Able to raise the whole team’s leverage with these tools, so the team sustains a far larger estate than its headcount would suggest
• Instinct for automation: a recurring ticket is a defect in the process, not a workload

Soft Skills

• Ownership — you treat production as yours, including at inconvenient hours
• Judgement — you know which risks are worth taking and which are not, and can explain the difference
• Directness — you raise problems early, including unpopular ones, and give people honest feedback
• Pragmatism — you choose the maintainable solution over the elegant one
• Teaching — you make the people around you better rather than becoming indispensable
• Calm under pressure — outages are a normal part of the work, not a crisis of confidence