Principal Infrastructure Engineer

DHL; Chennai District; Hybrid; Confidential; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangements

Annual Leave: 42 days

Medical Insurance (Self + Family)

Job summary

DHL is seeking a Principal Infrastructure Engineer in Chennai, India, to lead a team of Cloud Platform Engineers. You will be responsible for designing and maintaining secure, scalable cloud services while collaborating with architecture and DevOps teams.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in Terraform, Azure infrastructure, and Kubernetes. This role offers hybrid work arrangements alongside a comprehensive benefits package including generous leave and medical insurance.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem.
• 5+ years in cloud platform engineering or SRE roles.
• Expert-level knowledge of Terraform and Azure.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of platform engineers.
• Design and maintain Azure infrastructure with Terraform.
• Operate Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters.

Skills

Terraform expertise

Azure knowledge

Kubernetes expertise

CI/CD with GitHub Actions

Security mindset

Strong communication skills

Tools

Docker

Helm

GitHub

Grafana

Job description

Principal Infrastructure Engineer

As Principal Infrastructure Engineer, you are responsible for leading a team of Cloud Platform Engineers and driving the design, build, and operation of a secure, scalable, and reliable Cloud Platform. You combine strong technical expertise with people leadership to enable product and development teams through standardized, automated, and compliant cloud services. You act as a technical role model and coach your team, and collaborate closely with architecture, security, DevOps, and application teams.

Key Responsibilities

Leadership & Stakeholder Management

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of platform engineers, including goal setting, performance reviews, and skill development.
• Foster a collaborative culture focused on innovation, ownership, quality, and continuous improvement, considering working in global teams.
• Prioritize workload, allocate tasks, and ensure high-quality and timely delivery.

Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Architecture

• Design, implement, and maintain Azure infrastructure using Terraform and Terraform Cloud.
• Develop and maintain reusable Terraform modules (AKS, Key Vault, Storage Accounts, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Log Analytics, VMs, Capacity Reservations, Diagnostic Settings, Delete Locks).
• Manage multi-environment deployments with proper state management and drift detection.
• Operate and evolve infrastructure for the Observability Platform (O11y) and shared platform services (SDB).

Kubernetes & Container Platform

• Operate and maintain Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters.
• Manage Helm-based deployments for platform components.
• Implement and enforce cluster policies with Kyverno.
• Operate ingress solutions (Ingress-NGINX, Traefik).
• Manage secrets with External Secrets Operator (ESO) and Azure Key Vault.
• Ensure cluster resilience through backup/recovery with Velero.
• Build and maintain container images and Docker build pipelines.

Observability & Monitoring

• Operate the full observability stack: Grafana Enterprise, Grafana Mimir (metrics), Grafana Tempo (tracing), Prometheus, Splunk, Sentry (APM).
• Implement and manage OpenTelemetry collectors and pipelines.
• Maintain observability-as-code practices (dashboards, alerting rules, IRM configuration via Terraform).
• Operate custom monitoring solutions (prometheus-redis-exporter, blackbox-exporter, security monitoring).

CI/CD & Automation

• Build and maintain GitHub Actions workflows and reusable actions.
• Operate self-hosted GitHub Action Runners (infrastructure and application runners).
• Manage automated dependency updates with Renovate.
• Maintain Docker image build and caching pipelines.

Security & Compliance

• Operate container vulnerability scanning with Trivy and Twistlock.
• Monitor and manage Azure Service Principals and their lifecycle.
• Implement network security (WAF with Coraza, SOCKS proxies, SFTP exchange).
• Manage secrets lifecycle and rotation strategies.

Collaboration & Platform Services

• Operate Mattermost as a self-hosted collaboration platform.
• Maintain database infrastructure (PostgreSQL, Redis) including DBA tooling and pgAdmin.
• Support disaster recovery processes and tooling.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in the ecosystem of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
• 5+ years experience in cloud platform engineering or SRE roles
• Expert-level Terraform — modular architecture, Terraform Cloud, state management, provider development
• Deep Azure knowledge — AKS, Key Vault, Storage, PostgreSQL, Networking, RBAC, Service Principals
• Kubernetes expertise — Helm, operators, policy engines (Kyverno/OPA), ingress controllers, secrets management
• Observability stack — Grafana, Prometheus, Mimir, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent distributed tracing/metrics systems
• CI/CD — GitHub Actions (writing custom actions and reusable workflows), container registries, GitOps
• Git & Version Control: GitHub Enterprise, branching strategies, code review processes
• Networking: DNS, TCP/IP, firewalls, VPNs, ingress controllers
• Scripting & development — Shell scripting, Go, Python; Dockerfile authoring
• Security mindset — Container scanning, secret management, network segmentation, WAF
• Strong communication skills in cross-functional and international setups
• Strong understanding of multithreading, concurrency, and performance tuning
• Strong leadership presence and ability to motivate diverse engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of Agile, Scrum
• Strategic thinker with the ability to make informed technical decisions.
• Proactive problem-solver with a focus on outcomes and quality.
• Background working in large / global enterprise environments and multicultural teams.
• Familiarity with tools like Jira, Confluence.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Interest in taking responsibility for exciting and innovative projects that further digitalize Deutsche Post / DHL.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written in English.

Nice to have

• Experience with Splunk or Sentry
• Knowledge of Terraform Cloud at enterprise scale
• Experience operating Mattermost or similar self-hosted platforms
• Familiarity with Telepresence for Kubernetes dev workflows
• Experience with Azure capacity reservations and cost optimization
• Azure certifications (AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-305)

Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangements to balance in‑office collaboration and home flexibility.
• Annual Leave: 42 days off apart from Public / National Holidays.
• Medical Insurance: Self + Spouse + 2 children. An option to opt for Voluntary Parental Insurance (Parents / Parent‑in‑laws) at a nominal premium covering pre‑existing disease.
• In‑House training programs: professional and technical training certifications.