Technical Lead – Site Reliability Engineering

UPS; Chennai District; Hybrid; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

UPS in Chennai seeks a Technical Lead for Site Reliability Engineering to guide architecture decisions, drive reliability, and lead automation across production systems.

You will own on-call response, collaborate with globally distributed teams including US hours, and work with Java, cloud platforms (Azure/GCP), and observability tools like Grafana and Splunk to improve self-healing and performance.

Qualifications

• 11+ years backend engineering and production support.
• Strong Java development.
• Distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Azure/GCP cloud platforms.
• Strong knowledge of messaging systems (AMQ, MQ, Kafka).
• Expertise with Couchbase and PostgreSQL on cloud databases.
• Experience with observability tools like Grafana and Splunk.
• Scripting and automation skills (Python preferred).

Responsibilities

• Define operational standards, engineering best practices, and runbooks.
• Lead critical production incidents and complex troubleshooting efforts.
• Design and implement reliability improvements across applications and infrastructure.
• Drive self-healing systems and automation initiatives.
• Establish observability standards using metrics, logs, and distributed tracing.
• Mentor engineers and QA team members.
• Drive adoption of AI-powered engineering and operational tooling.
• Collaborate with development teams on production readiness and operational improvements.

Skills

Backend engineering

Java

Distributed systems

Event-driven

Azure/GCP

Messaging systems

Observability

Python scripting

Mentoring

On-call readiness

Tools

Couchbase

PostgreSQL

Job description

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Job Description

Role Summary

The Technical Lead provides technical leadership for the SRE organization by driving architecture decisions, operational excellence, observability, and automation. This individual serves as the highest technical authority within the engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Define operational standards, engineering best practices, and runbooks.
• Lead critical production incidents and complex troubleshooting efforts.
• Design and implement reliability improvements across applications and infrastructure.
• Drive self-healing systems and automation initiatives.
• Establish observability standards using metrics, logs, and distributed tracing.
• Mentor engineers and QA team members.
• Drive adoption of AI-powered engineering and operational tooling.
• Collaborate with development teams on production readiness and operational improvements.

Required Skills

• 11+ years of backend engineering and production support experience.
• Strong Java development experience.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Azure/GCP cloud platforms.
• Strong knowledge of messaging systems (AMQ, MQ, Kafka, etc.).
• Expertise with Couchbase, PostgreSQL, and cloud databases.
• Experience with observability tools such as Grafana and Splunk.
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Python preferred).

As part of the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization, every team member plays a critical role in maintaining the reliability and availability of our production systems.

This role supports a 24x7 production environment supporting business-critical applications.

All engineers are expected to participate in an on‑call support rotation, including evenings, weekends, and public holidays as scheduled.

During on‑call periods, you will be expected to respond to production incidents within defined response time objectives, troubleshoot issues, and work collaboratively to restore service as quickly as possible.

Candidates should be comfortable diagnosing complex production issues across applications, cloud infrastructure, databases, messaging systems, and integrations.

Participation in post‑incident reviews, root cause analysis (RCA), and implementation of permanent corrective actions is an essential part of the role.

Team members are expected to continuously improve operational processes through automation, monitoring enhancements, and proactive reliability improvements to reduce recurring incidents.

Flexibility to collaborate with globally distributed teams, including occasional overlap with US business hours, is expected to support production operations and major releases.

A strong sense of ownership, accountability, and customer focus is essential, as ensuring platform stability and business continuity is a shared responsibility across the entire team.

Employee Type

Permanent

UPS is committed to providing a workplace free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.