Cloud Architect & Operations Lead

Location: Chennai, India

Experience: 8 - 12 years

Employment Type: Full-time

Role Summary

We are looking for a Cloud Architect & Operations Lead to own architecture, delivery, and day-to-day operations of secure, cost-optimized cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP. You will drive hybrid cloud strategy, microservices modernization, observability, and FinOps practices for enterprise BFSI clients operating within regulatory constraints, including RBI, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will both design and operate cloud environments, not just advise.

Key Responsibilities

1. Architecture and Design

- Design and govern multi-cloud landing zones across AWS, Azure, and GCP with environment-tiered resource sizing for Development, Staging, Production, and Disaster Recovery.
- Architect hybrid connectivity patterns, including site-to-site VPN, ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, and SD-WAN integration with on-premises data centres.
- Define multi-tenancy isolation strategies at namespace, cluster, and account levels for SaaS platforms serving BFSI clients.

1. Microservices and Platform Engineering

- Lead containerization of legacy monoliths and define target-state microservices architecture.
- Own Kubernetes cluster design using EKS, AKS, or GKE, including node pool sizing, autoscaling policies, resource quotas, and namespace governance.
- Establish API gateway patterns, service mesh solutions such as Istio or Linkerd, and GitOps-driven CI/CD pipelines using ArgoCD or GitLab CI.

1. Security and Compliance

- Enforce a zero-trust security posture covering IAM least privilege, network segmentation, WAF, secrets management using Vault or KMS, and encryption in transit and at rest.
- Align architecture with NIST CSF, CIS Benchmarks, and RBI Cloud Guidelines.
- Own cloud security posture management (CSPM) tooling and audit readiness.

1. Cost Optimization and FinOps

- Right-size compute resources across environments using utilization data. Target sustained CPU and memory utilization below 70% in production and below 40% in non-production environments.
- Implement Reserved Instance and Savings Plan strategies.
- Maintain cloud cost dashboards with showback and chargeback by team and product.
- Define environment lifecycle policies, including automatic shutdown for Development and Testing and scheduled scaling for Staging.

1. Automation and Runbooks

- Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code repositories using Terraform or Bicep for full environment provisioning, policy enforcement, and teardown.




- Develop runbooks for P1/P2 incident response, failover, disaster recovery drills, and scaling events, integrated with ITSM tooling.

1. Observability and SRE

- Implement full-stack observability covering metrics using Prometheus, CloudWatch, or Azure Monitor; logs using ELK or Loki; traces using Jaeger or X-Ray; and alerting using PagerDuty or OpsGenie.
- Define and track SLOs and SLAs for each service.
- Lead blameless post-mortems and reliability reviews.

1. Operations Leadership

- Manage the cloud operations team and establish on-call rotations, escalation paths, and incident severity frameworks.
- Produce monthly cloud health reports covering cost, availability, capacity, and security posture.

Environment Right-Sizing Guidance: The following reference baseline is expected to be validated, challenged, and optimized by the candidate after joining.

Development Environment

- Purpose: Individual development workloads and feature branches.
- Compute baseline: 24 vCPU and 4–8 GB RAM per workload.
- Preferred resources: Spot or preemptible instances.
- Estimated monthly cost: USD 300–600.

Staging / QA Environment
- Purpose: Integration testing, UAT, and load simulation.
- Compute baseline: 4–8 vCPU and 16–32 GB RAM.
- Preferred configuration: On-demand resources with automatic shutdown during nights and weekends.
- Estimated monthly cost: USD 800–1,500.

Production Environment
- Purpose: Live BFSI workloads requiring high availability.
- Compute baseline: 16–64 vCPU and 64–256 GB RAM.
- Preferred configuration: Reserved or committed-use resources with multi-AZ deployment.
- Estimated monthly cost: USD 4,000–12,000.

Disaster Recovery / Standby Environment
- Recovery objectives: RTO below 4 hours and RPO below 1 hour for critical systems.
- Preferred configuration: Warm standby at 25–50% of production capacity, with pilot light for non-critical systems.
- Estimated monthly cost: USD 1,500–4,000.

Observability Stack
- Purpose: Centralized logging, monitoring, and tracing.
- Compute baseline: 4–8 vCPU and 16 GB RAM dedicated resources.
- Storage: S3 or Blob Storage for log archival.
- Estimated monthly cost: USD 400–900.





These cost estimates assume moderate BFSI workloads in a mid-size enterprise with 50–200 microservices. One-year Reserved Instance discounts with no upfront payment may reduce compute costs by approximately 30–40% compared with on-demand pricing. Actual sizing must be driven by real utilization telemetry rather than provisioned-capacity assumptions.

Right-Sizing Principles

- Flag resources with sustained utilization below 20% for potential downsizing.
- Use Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) to right-size pod requests and limits.
- Mandate resource tagging using environment, team, cost centre, and product. Tagging is a prerequisite for FinOps attribution.
- Report data transfer and egress costs separately from compute costs.

Required Skills and Experience:
- 8–12 years of enterprise IT experience, with at least 4 years of hands-on cloud architecture experience across at least two of AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes, including EKS, AKS, or GKE cluster design, RBAC, network policies, and autoscaling.
- Strong Infrastructure as Code skills, with Terraform as the primary tool. Bicep or CloudFormation experience is acceptable.
- Networking expertise covering VPC design, peering, PrivateLink, firewall rules, DNS, and load balancing.
- Cloud security expertise covering IAM, CSPM, SIEM integration, secrets management, and cloud-native WAF.
- Observability experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, or equivalent enterprise tools.
- Scripting skills in Python or Go for automation, along with Bash or PowerShell for operations tooling.
- Working knowledge of BFSI regulatory requirements, including RBI Cloud Guidelines, PCI-DSS, or equivalent regulatory frameworks.

Preferred Certifications Core Certification — At Least One Required

- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Qualified
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect

Supporting Certifications — Valued

- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
- FinOps Certified Practitioner
- CCSP or equivalent cloud security certification
- TOGAF, beneficial for enterprise architecture discussions

What We Are Not Looking For:
- Purely advisory or presales architects without hands-on delivery experience.
- Candidates who have operated only in single-cloud environments without hybrid exposure.
- Candidates unfamiliar with regulated workload constraints, including data residency, audit logging, and encryption mandates.

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