Principal Architect, DevOps

Role - Principal Architect, DevOps

Standard Title - Principal Architect, DevSecOps

Location: Bangalore, India

About Us

Founded in 2014, Circles is a global technology company reimagining the telco industry with its innovative SaaS platform, empowering telco operators worldwide to effortlessly launch innovative digital brands or refresh existing ones, accelerating their transformation into techcos.

Today, Circles partners with leading telco operators across multiple countries and continents, including KDDI Corporation, Etisalat Group (e&), AT&T, and Telkomsel, creating blueprints for future telco and digital experiences enjoyed by millions of consumers globally.

Besides its SaaS business, Circles operates three other distinct businesses:

• Circles.Life: A wholly-owned digital lifestyle telco brand based in Singapore, Circles.Life is powered by Circles' SaaS platform and pioneering go-to-market strategies. It is the digital market leader in Singapore and has won numerous awards for marketing, customer service, and innovative product offerings beyond connectivity.
• Circles Aspire: A global provider of Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) solutions. Its cloud-based Experience Cloud platform enables enterprises, service providers and developers to deliver and scale mobile, messaging, IoT, and connectivity services worldwide.
• Jetpac: Specializing in travel tech solutions, Jetpac provides seamless eSIM roaming for over 200 destinations and innovative travel lifestyle products, redefining connectivity for digital travelers. Jetpac was awarded Travel eSIM of the Year.

Circles is backed by renowned global investors, including Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia), Warburg Pincus, Founders Fund, and EDBI (the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board), with a track record of backing industry challengers.

Role Description

DevOps is a core, cross-functional discipline that spans the entire organization, offering the unique opportunity to collaborate with multiple teams across diverse products and platforms. Your role is central to ensuring software features are reliable, scalable, and ready for both build-and-launch and operational handoffs.

As a DevOps Principal Architect you will operate as a hands-on individual contributor, responsible for proposing, designing, implementing, and troubleshooting robust CI/CD pipelines for multi-tier applications deployed on virtual machines and containerized platforms in public cloud environments. You'll collaborate closely with principal engineers across various teams.

This is a fantastic opportunity to be part of a highly skilled team where your impact will be felt organization-wide. It also offers a platform to deepen your expertise in DevOps while enhancing both your technical and strategic business skill sets.

You will be immersed in a cutting-edge DevOps ecosystem featuring CI/CD automation, ephemeral (dynamic) environments, automated QA pipelines, fan-out deployment strategies, blue/green releases, and scalable deployment to partner environments—ranging from on-premises to multi-cloud platforms.

Your Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines for containerized applications, covering the full lifecycle from build to deployment.
• Establish continuous delivery and deployment pipelines integrated with release workflows to support streamlined release orchestration.
• Diagnose and resolve issues in multi-layered, containerized applications deployed in cloud environments.
• Own infrastructure architecture and define non-functional requirements, ensuring alignment with the overall technology roadmap and platform launch objectives.
• Champion a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture across the organization by promoting industry best practices, standards, tools, documentation, and reusable code across engineering teams.
• Design, develop, and drive adoption of solutions that enhance observability, reliability, and operational efficiency across the platform.
• Integrate AI-driven solutions into the software development lifecycle to enhance development and operational efficiency.
• Automate manual, repetitive, or mechanical processes by applying software and scripting solutions wherever beneficial.
• Troubleshoot complex, cross-platform issues spanning OS, networking, and databases in a cloud-based SaaS environment; handle live production incidents and ensure implementation of SRE best practices.
• Conduct system discovery and analysis to identify and implement performance, availability, and reliability improvements.
• Collaborate with software engineers and QA teams to ensure the system meets non-functional requirements such as performance, availability, and security.
• Maintain comprehensive system documentation, develop runbooks, and ensure key system knowledge is accessible to relevant stakeholders.
• Manage and monitor infrastructure deployment and orchestration, including servers, Docker containers, Kubernetes clusters, and other backend components.
• Stay up-to-date with security trends, proactively identify vulnerabilities, and troubleshoot complex security issues.
• Participate in an on-call rotation, including weekend support, to ensure high availability and quick incident response.

Required Technical Competencies

• Bachelors or masters degree in Information Technology/Computer Science or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Minimum 14+ years of hands-on experience with CI/CD platforms, Kubernetes, and a strong background in DevOps, SRE, and Agile methodologies.
• Expertise in designing, developing, testing, and implementing CI/CD pipelines for automating build, deployment, and code promotion processes.
• Proven experience in designing, setting up, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters and managing containerised pipelines.
• Must possess extensive knowledge in DevOps principles, SDLC and DevOps rollout in a large organization
• Proficient in writing automation scripts and pipelines using Groovy or Python to streamline routine tasks and eliminate manual intervention.
• Strong background in troubleshooting CI/CD pipeline issues, especially for containerised and multi-layer applications deployed in GCP or AWS.
• Experience in infusing AI into the software development lifecycle to enhance automation and decision-making.
• Extensive experience working with cloud-native CI/CD environments, and container technologies including Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Helm.
• Solid experience as a Linux system administrator (e.g., Ubuntu, RedHat), with proficiency in command-line tools such as Bash, VIM, and SSH.
• Familiarity with infrastructure monitoring and performance analysis tools like Grafana, Prometheus, DataDog, Nagios, and New Relic.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to perform deep root-cause analysis and implement effective solutions.

Required Business Skills

• Self-motivated, adaptable, and able to manage multiple priorities independently with a collaborative, team-first attitude.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, capable of clearly conveying ideas to diverse stakeholders using visual aids like PowerPoint and architecture diagrams.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical abilities with a data-driven mindset to identify root causes, validate outcomes, and provide effective solutions.
• Quick to learn new technologies and apply them to deliver impactful, timely results with minimal supervision.
• Organized and detail-oriented, with the ability to provide relevant project updates and insights to stakeholders efficiently.

Technical Competencies (nice to have)

• Experience integrating AI into the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), particularly within CI/CD pipelines.
• Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Configuration Management as Code (CMaC), and Policy as Code (PoaC) is highly desirable
• In-depth knowledge of common internet protocols and applications such as SMTP, DNS, HTTP, SSH, SNMP, etc.
• Familiarity with platforms like GitLab or GitHub and technologies like ELK stack, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and Etcd.

Certifications (nice to have)

• Kubernetes CKA or CKAD certification is nice to have
• AWS or GCP DevOps related certifications is nice to have
• GCP or AWS certification on cloud architecture - associate/professional is nice to have

To all recruitment agencies: Circles will only acknowledge resumes shared by recruitment agencies if selected in our preferred supplier partnership program. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Circles employees or any other company location. Circles will not be held accountable for any fees related to unsolicited resumes not uploaded via our ATS. Circles is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, disability or age.