Lead Engineer - DevOps

Location: IND-Pune-Smartworks

Remote Type: Hybrid (8 days/month)

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Lead DevOps Engineer. As a Lead, you will manage and mentor a team of 3–4 DevOps Engineers while also operating as a strong individual contributor (approximately 75% of your capacity). You will own the modernization, reliability, and scalability of our DevOps ecosystem—driving CI/CD excellence, enhancing release operations, strengthening infrastructure automation, and ensuring smooth deployments across multiple global regions.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10–15 years of total experience, with at least 4–5 years in senior/lead DevOps roles.
• Strong expertise in Azure cloud, including AKS, Azure Networking, MySQL PaaS, IAM, Storage.
• Deep knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes (AKS), Helm, and container lifecycle management.
• Expertise in CI/CD using:
  • Azure DevOps Pipelines
  • GitHub Actions (migration experience is a strong advantage)
• Strong, hands-on IaC experience:
  • YAML-based templates (ADO/GitHub)
  • Terraform (must-have for upcoming initiatives)
• Strong understanding of multi-region deployments, artifact management, and release orchestration.
• Solid debugging skills for pipelines, container workloads, connectivity, performance, and MySQL/Azure PaaS behaviour.
  • Excellent understanding of monitoring, logs, and alerting using Datadog , Azure Log Analytics (ALA), etc.
• Experience with Secrets Management via Vault or equivalent.
• Strong scripting in PowerShell is mandatory.  Exposure to Bash/Python is a plus.
• Exposure to CI/CD build processes for .NET and Angular applications (dotnet CLI, NuGet, npm/Angular CLI), with the ability to troubleshoot build and dependency issues.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow DevOps engineers.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with JIRA, ServiceNow, or enterprise ITSM processes.
• Feature flag systems (Azure App Configuration, or similar).
• Experience in Power BI
• Knowledge of GitOps practices (ArgoCD/Flux).
• Exposure to FinOps, cost optimization, and cloud governance.

Experience with API Gateway, service mesh, or advanced AKS networking.

Key Responsibilities

1. Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

• Lead design, deployment, and optimization of infrastructure on Azure (AKS, VMSS/IaaS, Azure PaaS services—especially Azure App Services, Key Vault, Service Bus, Az Redis, AZ Entra ID,MySQL).
• Own and improve container orchestration workflows using Docker & AKS.
• Drive segregation of services into individual AKS pods for improved reliability and scalability.
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform (transition from existing Classic/YAML-based IaC in ADO/GitHub).

2. CI/CD & Release Engineering

• Own end-to-end CI/CD pipelines across ADO and GitHub Actions.
• Lead the migration from Azure DevOps pipelines → GitHub Actions.
• Leads Hands Free release transition
• Maintain and optimize build & release pipelines for over 20+ services deployed to global regions.
• Develop automated, hands-free deployment processes with guardrails, validations, and rollback mechanisms.
• Troubleshoot and resolve pipeline failures, environment issues, and release blockers—including MySQL PaaS-related issues.
• Support release execution across multiple global regions, ensuring release readiness, consistency of configuration, and alignment of deployments.
• Support production release, ensure gaps in release configuration are identified and resolved proactively.
• Help standardize, automate, and optimize release workflows to improve predictability and reduce manual steps.

3. Reliability & Operations

• Ensure reliability and health of AKS workloads across multiple regions.
• Set up effective monitoring, alerting, and dashboards using Datadog, Azure Log Analytics, and related tools.
• Manage secrets and configurations using Vault and Azure-native services.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve service resilience, deployment patterns, and release quality.

4. Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead and mentor a DevOps team of 3–4 engineers.
• Collaborate closely with Development, QA, SRE, Architecture, Security, and Program Management.
• Define standards, best practices, and governance for CI/CD, IaC, and release management.
• Drive a culture of automation, performance optimization, and continuous improvement.

Our Interview Practices

To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.

Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.