Lead – Cloud Operations & Reliability

We are seeking a Cloud Operations Lead to support a leading IT R&D organization in Kolkata. This role ensures the stability, performance, and security of cloud-based systems while driving operational excellence through proactive monitoring, incident management, automation, and capacity planning. You will lead cross-functional teams, optimize cloud resources for cost efficiency, and champion automation to reduce manual effort and improve reliability.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Operations & Reliability

• Manage day-to-day operations across production, staging, and development cloud environments within an R&D context.
• Ensure high availability of services through robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.
• Lead root cause analyses (RCA) and post-mortem reviews to drive continuous improvement.
• Implement observability practices including logging, tracing, and metrics for proactive issue detection.
• Oversee patch management and maintenance to ensure systems remain secure and up-to-date.

Automation & Optimization

• Develop and maintain automation scripts for provisioning, scaling, and monitoring cloud resources.
• Optimize cloud usage through rightsizing, reserved instances, and cost governance (FinOps).
• Standardize operational runbooks and playbooks to streamline processes and reduce manual effort.

Security & Compliance

• Enforce security baselines, including IAM, encryption, and network segmentation across cloud services.
• Collaborate with security teams to implement cloud-native security tools and respond to threats.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory standards and audits (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable).

Team Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of cloud operations engineers.
• Promote a culture of SRE/DevOps best practices, automation, and operational reliability.
• Partner with application, DevOps, and networking teams to support business-critical R&D initiatives.
• Act as escalation point for critical incidents and operational challenges.

Vendor & Stakeholder Management

• Manage relationships with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and monitoring tool vendors.
• Provide operational metrics and status updates to senior leadership.
• Collaborate with finance to align cloud cost forecasts and budget planning.

Required Qualifications

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or a related field.
• 5–8 years of experience in cloud operations, SRE, or IT infrastructure.
• 2+ years in a leadership role managing operational teams, preferably in an R&D environment.

Technical Skills

• Expertise in at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus).
• Strong knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates).
• Experience with incident management frameworks (ITIL, SRE principles, PagerDuty/On-Call rotations).
• Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS, AKS, GKE) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Understanding of cloud security best practices and compliance frameworks.

Soft Skills

• Proven ability to lead and inspire teams in a fast-paced R&D environment.
• Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and communication skills.
• Collaborative mindset to work effectively with technical and business stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud certifications (AWS SysOps, Azure Administrator, Google Cloud DevOps Engineer, or equivalent).
• Experience managing multi-cloud environments.
• Knowledge of FinOps and cost governance frameworks.
• Familiarity with ITIL processes or formal service management frameworks.

Key Success Metrics

• System Uptime:

  Meet or exceed availability SLAs (>99.9%).

• Incident Response:

  Reduced MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) for critical incidents.

• Cost Efficiency:

  Optimize resource utilization and achieve measurable cloud cost savings.

• Automation:

  Increase automation coverage for operational tasks year over year.

• Team Performance:

  Maintain high team engagement and development.