Lead – Cloud Operations

We are seeking a Cloud Operations Lead to support a leading IT R&D organization in Kolkata. This role ensures the stability, performance, and security of cloud-based systems while driving operational excellence through proactive monitoring, incident management, automation, and capacity planning. You will lead cross-functional teams, optimize cloud resources for cost efficiency, and champion automation to reduce manual effort and improve reliability. Key Responsibilities Cloud Operations & Reliability - Manage day-to-day operations across production, staging, and development cloud environments within an R&D context. - Ensure high availability of services through robust monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes. - Lead root cause analyses (RCA) and post-mortem reviews to drive continuous improvement. - Implement observability practices including logging, tracing, and metrics for proactive issue detection. - Oversee patch management and maintenance to ensure systems remain secure and up-to-date. Automation & Optimization - Develop and maintain automation scripts for provisioning, scaling, and monitoring cloud resources. - Optimize cloud usage through rightsizing, reserved instances, and cost governance (FinOps). - Standardize operational runbooks and playbooks to streamline processes and reduce manual effort. Security & Compliance - Enforce security baselines, including IAM, encryption, and network segmentation across cloud services. - Collaborate with security teams to implement cloud-native security tools and respond to threats. - Ensure compliance with regulatory standards and audits (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable). Team Leadership & Collaboration - Lead, mentor, and develop a team of cloud operations engineers. - Promote a culture of SRE/DevOps best practices, automation, and operational reliability. - Partner with application, DevOps, and networking teams to support business-critical R&D initiatives. - Act as escalation point for critical incidents and operational challenges. Vendor & Stakeholder Management - Manage relationships with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and monitoring tool vendors. - Provide operational metrics and status updates to senior leadership. - Collaborate with finance to align cloud cost forecasts and budget planning. Required Qualifications Education & Experience - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or a related field. - 5–8 years of experience in cloud operations, SRE, or IT infrastructure. - 2+ years in a leadership role managing operational teams, preferably in an R&D environment. Technical Skills - Expertise in at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, GCP). - Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus). - Strong knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates). - Experience with incident management frameworks (ITIL, SRE principles, PagerDuty/On-Call rotations). - Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS, AKS, GKE) and CI/CD pipelines. - Understanding of cloud security best practices and compliance frameworks. Soft Skills - Proven ability to lead and inspire teams in a fast-paced R&D environment. - Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and communication skills. - Collaborative mindset to work effectively with technical and business stakeholders. Preferred Qualifications - Cloud certifications (AWS SysOps, Azure Administrator, Google Cloud DevOps Engineer, or equivalent). - Experience managing multi-cloud environments. - Knowledge of FinOps and cost governance frameworks. - Familiarity with ITIL processes or formal service management frameworks. Key Success Metrics - System Uptime: Meet or exceed availability SLAs (>99.9%). - Incident Response: Reduced MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) for critical incidents. - Cost Efficiency: Optimize resource utilization and achieve measurable cloud cost savings. - Automation: Increase automation coverage for operational tasks year over year. - Team Performance: Maintain high team engagement and development.