Lead DevOps Engineer

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI); Hyderabad; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

NPCI is seeking a Lead DevOps Engineer in Hyderabad to architect, scale, and secure the CI/CD and infrastructure stack. You will lead platform reliability initiatives, drive automation, and mentor teams while remaining hands-on with production environments.

The role requires 6+ years in DevOps/SRE, strong Kubernetes expertise, and experience with GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Terraform, and Helm. This on-site position offers growth across cutting-edge cloud-native platforms.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering.
• Expertise in building and managing CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar tools.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes administration, deployment, and troubleshooting in production environments.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture, including Control Plane, ETCD, CNI, CSI, Scheduler, Kubelet, and RBAC.
• Hands‑on experience with Helm, Kustomize, Operators, CRDs, Service Meshes (Istio/Linkerd), and Ingress Controllers.
• Strong Linux administration skills, including performance tuning and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Bash and Python.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Strong understanding of deployment strategies such as Blue‑Green, Canary, and Rolling Deployments.
• Experience with observability tools including Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, and OpenTelemetry.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and secure CI/CD pipelines.
• Own the reliability, scalability, and security of Kubernetes platforms.
• Collaborate with development teams to improve release velocity and operational efficiency.
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code and automation best practices.
• Establish monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting standards.
• Lead incident management, root cause analysis, and post-mortem reviews.
• Drive SLO/SLI adoption and platform reliability initiatives.
• Evaluate and introduce new DevOps tools and technologies.
• Mentor engineers and promote DevOps best practices across teams.

Skills

DevOps

SRE

Platform Engineering

Leadership

CI/CD pipelines

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

GitLab CI

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

ArgoCD

Terraform

Ansible

Bash

Python

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK Stack

OpenTelemetry

GitOps

SRE

Platform Engineering

Job description

Position: Lead DevOps Engineer

Location: Hyderabad

Employment Type: Full-Time (Permanent)

Job Description:

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead DevOps Engineer to architect, build, and scale our infrastructure and CI/CD ecosystem. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in Kubernetes, automation, infrastructure reliability, and DevOps best practices, with the ability to lead initiatives while remaining hands‑on with production environments.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and secure CI/CD pipelines.
• Own the reliability, scalability, and security of Kubernetes platforms.
• Collaborate with development teams to improve release velocity and operational efficiency.
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code and automation best practices.
• Establish monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting standards.
• Lead incident management, root cause analysis, and post-mortem reviews.
• Drive SLO/SLI adoption and platform reliability initiatives.
• Evaluate and introduce new DevOps tools and technologies.
• Mentor engineers and promote DevOps best practices across teams.

Required Skills:

• 6+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering.
• Expertise in building and managing CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar tools.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes administration, deployment, and troubleshooting in production environments.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture, including Control Plane, ETCD, CNI, CSI, Scheduler, Kubelet, and RBAC.
• Hands‑on experience with Helm, Kustomize, Operators, CRDs, Service Meshes (Istio/Linkerd), and Ingress Controllers.
• Strong Linux administration skills, including performance tuning and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Bash and Python.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Strong understanding of deployment strategies such as Blue‑Green, Canary, and Rolling Deployments.
• Experience with observability tools including Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, and OpenTelemetry.

Good to Have

• Experience managing on‑premises infrastructure and Kubernetes platforms (RKE2, K3s, etc.).
• Knowledge of networking concepts including VLANs, DNS, Load Balancing, Firewalls, and Storage Backends (Ceph, NFS, iSCSI).
• Experience with GitOps, Progressive Delivery, and ArgoCD.
• Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure and GPU workloads.
• Previous experience leading DevOps teams and driving technical roadmaps.

Skills:

Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, Terraform, Ansible, Linux, Bash, Python, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry, GitOps, SRE, Platform Engineering