Lead DevOps Engineer

Role Overview

We're looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to own, architect, and scale our infrastructure and CI/CD landscape. You'll be the go-to person for pipeline design, Kubernetes operations, and infrastructure reliability — someone who's been in the trenches of production-grade systems and can guide a team while staying hands-on.

Experience &

- Qualifications
- 6+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering roles.
- Proven track record of designing and operating production-grade Kubernetes environments at scale.
- Prior experience in a lead or senior individual contributor role mentoring engineers and driving DevOps best practices (good to have).

Must-Have Skills

CI/CD &

- Pipelines
- Expert-level proficiency in building, optimizing, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines from scratch.
- Deep experience with tools such as GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD.
- Strong understanding of pipeline security, artifact management, and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling).

Operating Systems &

- Fundamentals
- Deep understanding of Linux internals — processes, memory management, filesystems, networking, and IPC.
- Solid grasp of OS-level performance tuning, troubleshooting, and kernel parameters.
- Strong scripting skills (Bash, Python) for automation and tooling.

Kubernetes (Deep &

- Thorough)
- Hands-on experience deploying, managing, and troubleshooting Kubernetes in production.
- Deep knowledge of K8s architecture — control plane, kubelet, etcd, CNI, CSI, scheduler, and admission controllers.
- Experience with Helm, Kustomize, Operators, CRDs,



and policy management.
- Strong understanding of workload lifecycle, resource management, autoscaling (HPA/VPA/Cluster Autoscaler), and RBAC.
- Familiarity with service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) and ingress controllers.

Good to Have

- Experience working in on-premises environments — bare metal or virtualized infrastructure.
- Understanding of on-prem Kubernetes setup — RKE2, K3s, or similar provisioning tools.
- Knowledge of on-prem networking — VLANs, load balancing, DNS, firewall rules, and storage backends (Ceph, NFS, iSCSI).
- Prior lead DevOps experience — driving technical decisions, roadmap planning, and mentoring junior engineers.

What You'll Do

- Architect, build, and maintain resilient CI/CD pipelines across multiple services and environments.
- Own the reliability, scalability, and security of our Kubernetes clusters.
- Collaborate with development teams to improve deployment velocity and infrastructure self-service.
- Drive infrastructure-as-code practices using Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent.
- Establish observability standards — logging, monitoring, and tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).
- Lead incident response and post-mortem culture; drive SLO/SLI adoption.
- Evaluate and introduce current tools and practices to improve operational efficiency.
- Mentor team members and set DevOps standards across the organization.

Nice to Have

- Experience with GPU workloads or AI/ML infrastructure.
- Familiarity with container runtimes beyond containerd (CRI-O, etc.).
- Exposure to GitOps workflows and progressive delivery tooling.

📌 Lead DevOps (Hyderabad)
🏢 NPCI
📍 Hyderabad