Role Summary

Principal Production Engineer - Operations As a Principal Production Engineer in Operations, you are the final-escalation authority within your shift and the named on-call anchor for the team. You drive root-cause analyses to engineering-grade quality before handoff to the SRE engineering practice in the same pillar, and you are the last call before the engineering lead is engaged.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with real shift weight and real authority. The team supports continuous operations across multiple shifts, and you will anchor on-call coverage for your assigned shift while partnering with the engineering lead on cross-shift incident command.

What sets this seat apart from a single-stack senior engineer is the breadth of technology you operate across. The estate covers low-code platforms, SaaS ecosystems, traditional enterprise stacks, RPA and automation tooling, integration middleware, and data and analytics platforms. You are expected to debug across all of them - not by memorising every product, but by reading logs, traces, code, and configuration in any reasonable stack and isolating where it broke.

Candidates who thrive in this role pick up unfamiliar tech in weeks, not quarters.

Responsibilities

1) Shift anchor and on-call leadership

- Hold the on-call anchor role for your shift and lead the L1/L2/L3 operations engineers working alongside you; carry the page that the engineering lead does not.
- Direct triage and dispatch in real time: pull L1 and L2 to the work they can own, keep senior capacity on the hard problems,



and step in only where the call genuinely needs you.
- Make incident-disposition decisions within your shift (escalate, resolve, or open a problem record) with disciplined judgment, and coach your team to make the same calls when you are not on the bridge.
- Run effective shift handoffs to maintain operational continuity across globally distributed teams, and raise the bar on handoff quality so the next shift inherits clarity, not noise.

2) Multi-stack debugging and major incident response

- Be the final-escalation point before the engineering lead, and earn the right to be the last call by consistently isolating fault domains across the stack faster than anyone else on shift.
- Debug across very different technology families - low-code (Power Platform, Power Automate), SaaS (Salesforce/SFDC, SharePoint), enterprise stacks (Java/JVM, .NET, Node.js, Python), RPA (Automation Anywhere or equivalent), integration middleware, and data/analytics platforms (Power BI, Tableau, SQL and NoSQL stores) - using logs, traces, metrics, code reading, and first-principles reasoning. Deep domain knowledge of every product is not the bar; the bar is finding where it broke and stopping the bleed.




- Lead in-shift major incident execution and partner with the engineering lead on cross-shift incident command. Own the bridge, drive comms, and keep the response moving.
- Coordinate cross-team response across engineering, product, platform, security, and vendor teams when needed, and hold each owner to explicit next steps and timestamps.

3) Root-cause engineering and pattern feedback

- Drive root-cause analyses to engineering-grade quality before handoff to the SRE engineering practice in the same pillar, covering symptom, timeline, fault domain, root cause, contributing factors, and the engineering work that follows.
- Partner with the engineering lead on problem management for chronic incident patterns, and convert recurring incidents into runbooks, automation, or alert tuning that L1 and L2 can execute on their own next time.
- Identify cross-product, cross-stack failure patterns across application, integration, infrastructure, data, and identity layers, and feed them upstream to the right engineering team with enough evidence that the fix is unambiguous.

Requirements

- Experience: 10+ years
- Location: Hyderabad (Onsite)
- Employment Type: Full-time
- Job Family: R3 - Operations / Application Support / Production Engineering / SRE-aligned Support

Disclaimer: This job posting has been aggregated from external source. Role details, content, and availability are subject to change. Applicants are advised to confirm the latest information directly on the company website before applying.

📌 Principal Production Engineer - Operations (Hyderabad)
🏢 Eli Lilly
📍 Hyderabad