Senior System Operations Engineer Onsite - Chennai

Uplers Solutions Private Limited.; Chennai; On-site; INR 4,200,000 - 6,400,000; Full time

Job summary

Uplers Solutions Private Limited in Chennai seeks a Senior System Operations Engineer to own the reliability of production Linux estate on Google Cloud Platform. You will lead incident response, DR design, and mentoring, turning architecture into tested systems.

Must have 6–10 years of Linux production experience, strong GCP, Docker/Kubernetes, Terraform, and solid DevOps practices. This is a hands-on leadership role with opportunities to influence platform direction.

Qualifications

• 6–10 years of Linux system administration in production.
• Expert-level Linux troubleshooting with real-world fixes.
• Strong GCP experience with SaaS platforms.
• Production Docker and Kubernetes experience, preferably with GKE.
• Nginx/Apache and application server stacks knowledge.
• Database operations (MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL): replication, HA.
• Strong Terraform experience and state management.
• Shell and Python for automation.
• DevOps practices: CI/CD, monitoring, alerting.
• Incident leadership and mentoring experience.
• Clear communication and documentation habits.

Responsibilities

• Disaster Recovery design, build, and ownership.
• Define DR on GCP with cross-region standby and failover.
• Lead major incidents as incident commander and drive resolution.
• Own observability stack and SLIs/SLOs.
• Design and operate GKE clusters with Jenkins/GitOps.
• Write reusable Terraform modules and manage remote state.
• Mentor engineers and maintain runbooks and DR docs.

Skills

Linux troubleshooting

SaaS experience

GCP expertise

Docker & Kubernetes

Nginx/Apache

Database operations

Terraform

Shell scripting

Python

DevOps practices

Incident leadership

Documentation

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GKE

Terraform

Ansible

GitHub Actions

Job description

Job Description:

Experience: 6.00 + years

Salary: Confidential (based on experience)

Expected Notice Period: 30 Days

Shift: (GMT+05:30) Asia/Kolkata (IST)

Opportunity Type: Office ()

Placement Type: Full Time Permanent position(Payroll and Compliance to be managed by: A cloud-based field service management SaaS platform)

(*Note: This is a requirement for one of Uplers' client - A cloud-based field service management SaaS platform)

Senior System Operations Engineer

CS is a SaaS platform that field service businesses rely on every day. We are looking for a Senior System Operations Engineer with 6 to 10 years of experience who will own the reliability of our production Linux estate on Google Cloud Platform. This is not a ticket-handling role. You will be the expert Linux troubleshooter the team escalates to, the owner of our Disaster Recovery design and execution, and a hands-on technical lead who mentors engineers, leads major incidents, and drives improvement projects from idea to production. You will work closely with the Cloud Architect, turning architecture direction into working, documented, and tested systems.

Our Environment

Cloud- Google Cloud Platform: Compute Engine, VPC, IAM, Cloud Storage, Cloud LoadBalancing, Cloud DNS

OS Linux servers across the estate (Ubuntu / Debian / RHEL family)

Containers Docker, Kubernetes on GKE

Web & App Nginx, Apache, application servers

Data Self-managed database servers (MySQL / PostgreSQL) with replication and backups

IaC & Scripting Terraform, Bash / Shell, Python

Practice Disaster Recovery, observability, CI/CD, change management, documentation

Key Responsibilities

• Disaster Recovery: Design, Build and Own
• Classify services by business criticality and agree RPO / RTO targets with engineering and business stakeholders.
• Design and implement the DR architecture on GCP: cross-region standby, snapshot and image policies, database replicas, DNS and load balancer failover, GKE workload recovery.
• Build DR infrastructure with Terraform so the recovery environment can be recreated from code, not memory.
• Write and maintain DR runbooks and playbooks plan and lead failover drills at least twice a year, report findings and close the gaps.
• Own the backup strategy for servers and databases and prove it with scheduled, documented restore tests.

Linux Expertise & Escalation Troubleshooting

• Act as the final escalation point for complex production issues across OS, network, web, application and database layers.
• Deep-dive performance problems: CPU scheduling, memory and OOM behaviour, disk and filesystem I/O, network stack, file descriptors and kernel parameters (sysctl).
• Use advanced tooling such as strace, perf, tcpdump, lsof, sar, iostat, ss, eBPF-based tools to find root cause.
• Define and maintain Linux build, hardening and patching standards for the whole estate.

Incident Leadership & Reliability

• Lead major incidents as incident commander: coordinate, communicate status and drive to resolution.
• Run blameless post-incident reviews, write RCAs and make sure corrective actions are completed.
• Define SLIs / SLOs for key services design and own the observability stack (metrics, logs, alerting, dashboards) and reduce alert noise.
• Design and improve the on-call process, escalation paths and runbook coverage.

Cloud, Containers & Platform (GCP / GKE)

• Design and operate GKE clusters: node pools, autoscaling, resource requests and limits, network policies, ingress, upgrades with minimal disruption.
• Introduce and maintain Helm / GitOps practices for consistent, reviewable deployments.
• Design GCP networking and IAM following least privilege own GCP cost optimisation and right-sizing.

Web, Application & Database Platforms

• Tune Nginx and Apache for performance and security: reverse proxy, TLS, caching, rate limiting, high availability.
• Partner with developers on application server performance, capacity and release readiness.
• Design database high availability and failover plan and execute upgrades and migrations with low or zero downtime lead capacity planning.

Automation & Infrastructure as Code

• Write reusable Terraform modules, manage remote state and bring manually built infrastructure under code.
• Build automation in Python and Shell that removes toil contribute to CI/CD pipelines and configuration management (e.g. Ansible).
• Own change management: peer-reviewed, tested and reversible changes to production.

Security & Compliance

• Drive OS and cloud hardening, vulnerability remediation, secrets and certificate management.
• Support security audits and customer due diligence questionnaires with accurate evidence and documentation.

Leadership, Mentoring & Documentation

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers: review their work, pair on incidents and grow their troubleshooting skills.
• Own the team's runbooks, SOPs, architecture diagrams and DR documentation set the documentation standard.
• Plan and deliver improvement projects communicate clearly with engineering, support, and management.
• Contribute to architecture discussions with the Cloud Architect and give honest, evidence-based recommendations.

Must – Have Skills & Experience

• 6 to 10 years of hands-on Linux system administration/operations in production. with at least 3 years supporting a SaaS platform.
• Expert-level Linux troubleshooting, with clear examples of complex production issues you diagnosed and permanently fixed.
• Strong hands-on GCP experience (AWS/Azure experience transferable).
• Production experience running Docker and Kubernetes, ideally GKE, including upgrades and troubleshooting.
• Deep knowledge of Nginx and Apache and application server stacks.
• Database operations (MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL): replication, HA, failover, backup/restore, performance basics.
• Strong Terraform experience, including writing modules and managing state.
• Strong Shell and good Python for automation and tooling.
• Solid DevOps practice: Git workflows, CI/CD, monitoring and alerting design.
• Experience Leading Incidents And Mentoring Other Engineers.
• Clear communicator with strong documentation habits, able to explain technical risk to non-technical stakeholders.

Good to Have

• Ansible or other configuration management at scale.
• With at least 3 years supporting a SaaS platform.
• Prometheus, Grafana, ELK / Loki, OpenTelemetry or similar observability stacks.
• Helm, Argo CD / Flux, Jenkins / GitLab CI / GitHub Actions.
• Redis, RabbitMQ or similar supporting services in production.
• Proven DR experience: you have designed or substantially built a DR setup, defined RPO/RTO and run real failover tests.
• Comfortable working with open-source tools and reading docs, source code and logs to solve problems.
• Certifications: RHCE, Google Professional Cloud Architect / DevOps Engineer, CKA / CKS.
• Experience with ISO 27001, SOC 2 or GDPR controls.

Why join us

• Own Disaster Recovery and reliability for a live, customer-facing SaaS platform.
• Modern cloud stack: GCP, GKE, Terraform and open-source tooling.
• Real influence on how the platform is built, working directly with the Cloud Architect.
• A clear growth path towards Lead / Architect roles, with learning and certification Expert-level Linux troubleshooting,support.