Lead DevOps Engineer

Sequoia; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Sequoia seeks a highly experienced Lead DevOps/Platform Engineer to own reliability, security, and scalability of a cloud-native platform. You will lead IaC programs, observability, incident response, and governance while advancing automated and secure platform capabilities for AI-enabled workloads.

The role blends hands-on engineering with technical leadership—60% technical ownership, 30% stakeholder management, and 10% people leadership—across multi-cloud environments and enterprise

Qualifications

• 10+ years in DevOps/Platform/SRE/Infra roles with software or infra development exposure
• Production ownership of large distributed systems, preferably container-based microservices
• Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills to pre-empt client-impacting issues
• Excellent communication to explain technical concepts to diverse stakeholders
• Prior technical leadership or Pod Lead experience across multiple product teams
• Experience with IaC refactors, CI/CD modernization, and observability uplift
• Built automated production workflows with human-in-the-loop gates

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate cloud-native infrastructure at scale
• Lead Infrastructure-as-Code programs and safe migration from monolithic to per-service configurations
• Support CI/CD and release engineering with reliability gates and SLOs
• Automate operational workflows with code and event-driven orchestration
• Partner on multi-cloud concerns: identity, edge/CDN, secrets management
• Own on-call routing, post-mortems, and fixed-feedback loops
• Advance platform reliability with tracing, logging, and SLO-based alerting
• Mentor engineers on IaC, observability, and platform automation
• Drive cross-functional alignment with Security and product development

Skills

Platform engineering

DevOps leadership

SRE

Cloud-native infra

IaC

CI/CD

Observability

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD tooling

Monitoring/Observability

Job description

We are seeking a highly experienced Lead DevOps/Platform (Native AI) 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.
• 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.