DIRECTOR - DIRECTOR

Job Summary:

The Practice Head for the DevOps Practice at Happiest Minds Product and Digital Engineering Services will be responsible for leading, growing, and innovating the DevOps practice to meet the evolving needs of our clients. This leadership role will focus on enhancing operational agility, improving delivery performance, and fostering a culture of automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement within both the organization and our clients? ecosystems.

The Practice Head will manage teams across various customer engagements, ensuring a consistent, high-quality approach to DevOps implementation. This individual will work closely with senior leadership and cross-functional teams to develop and execute strategies that drive the adoption of DevOps principles across cloud-native platforms, microservices architectures, and modern software delivery pipelines.

Key Responsibilities:

Practice Development & Growth:

• Build and lead a high-performance DevOps team by identifying, recruiting, and developing top talent.
• Establish and grow partnerships with key technology vendors and cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.).
• Actively contribute to pre-sales activities by collaborating with sales and business development teams to design solutions and develop go-to-market strategies for the DevOps practice.
• Expand the scope of the DevOps practice by identifying new market opportunities, developing service offerings, and driving the adoption of emerging technologies.

DevOps Strategy & Leadership:

• Develop and execute a comprehensive DevOps strategy aligned with the company overall Product and Digital Engineering Services goals.
• Foster an innovation-driven culture by introducing and adopting the latest DevOps trends, tools, and practices such as CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and cloud-native platforms.
• Lead efforts to streamline and improve software development, deployment, and monitoring processes across client projects.

Operational Excellence & Service Delivery:

• Oversee the implementation and management of DevOps frameworks, ensuring best-in-class service delivery and operational efficiency.
• Manage delivery of DevOps solutions to clients, ensuring successful implementation, adoption, and optimization of DevOps tools and processes.
• Continuously refine processes and frameworks for automation, configuration management, containerization, and cloud environments.
• Develop and maintain standardized frameworks, accelerators, and reusable assets to ensure consistent service delivery and reduce time-to-market.

Client Relationship Management:

• Engage with key clients to understand their challenges and business objectives, tailoring DevOps solutions that meet their needs.
• Act as a trusted advisor for clients, helping them adopt DevOps best practices and foster a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.

• Regularly review client engagements, ensuring projects are delivered on time, within budget, and with a focus on high-quality outcomes.

  Metrics & Continuous Improvement:

• Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for DevOps effectiveness, including deployment frequency, lead time, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rates.
• Drive continuous improvement efforts to reduce manual work, optimize resource utilization, and enhance the speed and reliability of delivery pipelines.
• Stay current on industry trends and advancements in DevOps, proactively bringing new ideas and solutions to both the internal team and clients.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement:

• Collaborate with other practice heads and senior leadership across Product and Digital Engineering Services to integrate DevOps with quality engineering, product management, and software development practices.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration between development, operations, security, and testing teams, breaking down silos and enabling faster, more efficient delivery.

Qualifications & Skills:

Education:

Experience:

• 12+ years of experience in software development, IT operations, or a related technical field, with at least 5 years in a leadership role in DevOps.
• Proven experience in leading DevOps transformations, driving automation, and implementing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Extensive experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and container orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.).

• Deep understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, Ansible, and other automation frameworks.

  Industry Expertise:

  Strong domain expertise in industries such as Healthcare, Retail, Media, or Manufacturing is preferred.

Technical Skills:

• Expert knowledge of DevOps tools and technologies (Jenkins, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native development, microservices architecture, and containerization.
• Familiarity with Agile, Lean, and ITIL principles.

Leadership & Collaboration:

• Proven leadership skills with experience managing and mentoring large teams.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Ability to influence senior leadership and customers while aligning on strategic goals.

Core Competencies:

• Customer Focus:

   Strong orientation towards client success and satisfaction.

• Passion for Innovation:

   An intrinsic drive for identifying and implementing the latest technology trends in DevOps.

• Accountability:

   Proven ability to take ownership of practice results and drive performance improvement.

• Collaboration:

   Strong interpersonal skills to foster teamwork across diverse teams.

• Results-Oriented:

   Focused on delivering measurable outcomes for clients and the business.