Senior Site Reliability Engineer Lead

Experience: Not Available to Not Available years

Location: Pune, India

Skills: Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Automation, Incident Management, Change Management, Observability, Splunk, Dynatrace, Blaze meter, CI/CD, Chef, Jenkins, GitHub, Unix, Oracle, Shell, Python

Job Summary
The Real Time Payments International team is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to drive application deployment readiness, manage day-to-day operational stability and support the reliability of critical payment platforms by implementing automation, leverage best practices and work with a high‑impact team responsible for driving production readiness, reliability, and DevOps automation across Mastercard platforms. This role plays a key part in incident management, change readiness, and platform operations, while contributing to continuous improvement initiatives.

Key Responsibilities
Platform Operations & Stability
Support end-to-end availability, monitoring, and performance of critical payment platforms.
• Execute operational processes to ensure platform health and stability.
• Participate in capacity checks, readiness validations, and environment monitoring.

Incident Management & Execution
Actively manage and coordinate incident triage and resolution.
• Serve as incident commander driving medium to high-severity incidents.
• Ensure timely updates, accurate impact assessment, and appropriate escalation.
• Contribute to root cause analysis with clear identification of actions and ownership.

Change & Release Support
Participate in highlighting gaps and defining test cases required for a change in lower environments and validate lower environment test completeness.
• Ensure adherence to change governance processes (test case reviews, checklists, approvals, rollback readiness).
• Engage in creating change plans and support execution of production changes, deployments, and validations.

Technical Troubleshooting
Perform hands-on troubleshooting across:
• Application behaviour and dependencies.
• Infrastructure components (compute, network, storage).
• Database and performance issues.
• Collaborate with engineering, infrastructure and other technical teams to isolate and resolve issues efficiently.

Monitoring & Observability
Improve system health monitoring using observability tools and alerts.
• Identify gaps in alerting and contribute to improving quality of alerting and dashboards.
• Ensure proactive detection of anomalies using observability tools.

Automation & Process Improvement
Contribute to automation initiatives to reduce toil and errors.
• Identify repetitive operational tasks and drive improvements.
• Support implementation of DevOps best practices.
• Leverage AI-driven tools to improve monitoring, incident detection, and operational efficiency, enabling faster troubleshooting and reduced manual effort in day-to-day operations.

Stakeholder Coordination




Work closely with engineering, program teams, and external partners during incidents and changes.
• Provide structured updates to stakeholders with clarity and consistency.
• Ensure alignment during critical activities.

Risk Identification
Highlight operational and platform risks including test coverage gaps, infrastructure constraints, dependency risks.
• Escalate issues proactively and support mitigation tracking.

Team Contribution & Mentorship
Support onboarding and guidance of junior team members.
• Contribute to runbooks, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Drive consistency in execution and adherence to operational standards.

Success in This Role Looks Like:
Deep Operational Ownership (“Built to Run” Mindset)
A successful Lead SRE Engineer is fully accountable for the operational health of their program, not just responsive to incidents.
• Monitoring, alerting, and dashboards that reflect real customer impact.
• Emergency response and incident leadership, including clear communications and post-incident follow‑ups.
• Capacity planning and readiness aligned with product and business growth.
• Change management discipline, ensuring safe, compliant releases.

Strong Technical & System-Level Understanding
A Lead SRE Engineer is expected to operate at system dependency level, not just ticket or tool level.
• Have a solid understanding of application business logic and workflows.
• Have a clear grasp of upstream/downstream dependencies.
• Expertise in observability (alerts, dashboards, synthetic monitoring).
• Ability to drive automation to reduce manual toil and recurring issues.
• End to End ownership of tasks and activities.

Incident Leadership & Decision-Making Under Pressure
Beyond technical skill, Leads are distinguished by how they lead during high‑severity situations.
• Takes command of major incidents, not waiting to be asked.
• Maintains calm, structured communication with engineering, product, and leadership.
• Balances speed vs risk in decision-making.
• Ensures clear ownership of actions, timelines, and follow‑ups.
• Drives root cause analysis and systemic fixes, not just recovery.

Proactive Risk & Reliability Engineering
A successful Lead SRE prevents incidents more than fight them.
• Identifies systemic risks before they become outages.
• Pushes for design, monitoring, or process improvements.
• Challenges “tribal knowledge” by insisting on documentation and runbooks.
• Drives improvements aligned with operational maturity models.

Leadership Without Formal Authority




Lead SRE Engineers often lead without being people managers, which requires strong influence skills.
• Mentors and coaches senior and mid-level SRE’s.
• Sets the technical and behavioural bar for the team.
• Gives clear, constructive feedback.
• Acts as a role model for ownership, urgency, and professionalism.
• Builds trust with Engineering, Product, and Platform teams.
• Flexible in terms of working hours where needed.

Excellent Cross‑Functional Communication
SRE Leads sit at the intersection of technology, operations, and business.
• Translating technical issues into business impact to communicate clearly with senior stakeholders during incidents.
• Setting expectations early and transparently with junior team members.
• Represents SRE confidently in planning, reviews, and retrospectives, ensuring post‑incident learnings are shared and acted upon.

Continuous Learning & Product Mastery
A Lead SRE Engineer is expected to continuously deepen product and platform knowledge.
• Actively closing knowledge gaps in their program by driving learning within the team.
• Staying current with platform changes, dependencies, and risks.
• Ensuring knowledge is documented and reusable, not person‑dependent.

Skill Requirements
Experience in production support, SRE, or BizOps roles.
• Exposure to managing incidents and supporting distributed systems.
• Experience in payments ecosystem will be preferred.
• Knowledge of monitoring and alerting tools like Splunk, Dynatrace, Blaze meter.
• Knowledge of automation and DevOps practices.
• Demonstrated ability to design end‑to‑end CI/CD flows that deliver high‑quality software to production with minimal manual intervention — including centralized configuration and unified pipelines across environments.
• Experience working in cross-functional and high-pressure environments.
• Ability to organize, multi-task and prioritise work based on current business needs.
• Possesses strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong relationship skills, collaborative skills and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience in one or more scripting language is preferred.
• Interest in designing, analysing and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
• Ability to work with little or no supervision.

Tech skills --
Operating System – Unix [Commands and scripting]
• Database - Oracle or equivalent
• Devops -> Chef, Jenkins, Github or any equivalent tools
• Supporting a java-based application in virtualized env and basic knowledge of VMs, hypervisors etc
• Monitoring - Splunk, Dynatrace or equivalent
• Scripting -- Shell or python will be preferred but anything equivalent will do
• Experience of supporting production systems (preferably in finance) is mandatory.

Other Requirements
Relevant certifications in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or Cloud Services are a plus.

📌 Senior Site Reliability Engineer Lead (Pune)
🏢 HCL Technologies
📍 Pune