Cloud Migration Services Practice Lead

Cloud Migration Services Practice Lead Title: Cloud Migration Services Practice Lead Organization: Amdocs Cloud Studios Location: India Reports to: Head of Cloud Studios CoE and Global Delivery Role Summary As the Cloud Migration Services Practice Lead, you own the end-to-end cloud migration strategy, technical leadership, and execution for the organization's clients. You will define and evolve the migration frameworks, methodologies, tools, and best practices that all Cloud Migration squads leverage for successful delivery. Your leadership ensures migrations are efficient, secure, scalable, and aligned with business outcomes. You will lead a specialized team of Cloud Migration Engineers and provide thought leadership and hands-on guidance to cross-functional teams. Your goal is to make cloud migrations repeatable, reliable, cost-effective, and value-driven for diverse enterprise environments. Key Responsibilities Strategy, Architecture & Assets - Own the overall cloud migration strategy and reference implementation for the practice (framework v1/v2 roadmap). - Define the core building blocks: migration assessment templates, automation tools, migration runbooks, and validation checklists. - Establish standards, guidelines, and review processes for how migrations are planned, executed, validated, and optimized. - Shape the multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategy: platform selection, migration patterns (lift-and-shift, re-platform, re-architect), and abstraction boundaries. - Create and maintain reusable assets, tools, accelerators, and reference architectures to drive consistency and efficiency across migration projects. - Develop and deliver presentations and technical briefings to customer executives, articulating migration strategies, value propositions, and technical roadmaps. - Provide advice on the latest market trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in cloud migration and modernization. Migration Execution & Enablement - Design and oversee multi-phase migration workflows (discovery, assessment, planning, execution, validation, cutover, optimization). - Build and maintain a Migration Toolkit and automation scripts that squads can easily adopt. - Define patterns for hosting, scaling, and optimizing workloads post-migration (Kubernetes/OpenShift, serverless, autoscaling, cost management). - Ensure migrations include observability by design: monitoring, logging, and reporting for each migration phase. - Participate in RFPs, proposal building, and solutioning for new business opportunities, providing high-end cloud consulting and technical leadership throughout the sales cycle. Risk, Compliance & Quality - Define the strategy for risk assessment and mitigation, including compliance with security, privacy, and regulatory requirements. - Standardize validation schemas and rollback patterns to ensure safe and effective migrations. - Own the quality assurance framework: - Pre- and post-migration validation - Golden test sets and regression suites - Performance, reliability, and security metrics for migrated workloads - Set the policy for governance and guardrails (e.g., change management, approvals, incident response). Cross-Team Leadership & Collaboration - Lead the Cloud Migration squad, providing mentoring, technical direction, and career guidance to migration engineers. - Collaborate with: - Application Modernization teams (refactoring, re-platforming) - Data Modernization teams (data migration, ETL/ELT, lineage) - Security and Compliance teams to ensure end-to-end coverage - Act as the technical bridge between R&D, Solution leads, delivery, and customer-facing teams. Required Skills & Experience Cloud & Migration Expertise - Deep hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, etc.) and migration tools (Azure Migrate, AWS Migration Hub, etc.). - Experience designing and/or leading large-scale cloud migrations, including: - Lift-and-shift, re-platforming, and re-architecting workloads - Hybrid and multi-cloud environments - Automation of migration processes using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation) - Application dependency mapping and migration wave planning - Strong assessment and planning capability; able to design migration roadmaps, risk mitigation plans, and cost models. - Familiarity with one or more migration frameworks (e.g., AWS Migration Acceleration Program, Azure Cloud Adoption Framework). - Experience with cloud security, identity, and compliance (IAM, encryption, regulatory standards). Technical Depth - 15+ years of software engineering / architecture experience, including platform/SDK-type work and cloud-native architectures. - Strong background in distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and event-driven patterns. - Deep expertise in Kubernetes/OpenShift, containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and modern DevOps practices. - Experience designing or integrating workflow/orchestration engines for migration and post-migration operations. - Solid understanding of observability: logs, metrics, traces, correlation IDs, and troubleshooting in production-like environments. - Proficiency in scripting and automation (Python, PowerShell, Bash, etc.) for migration and operational tasks. - Experience with networking, security, and performance optimization in cloud environments. Risk, Validation & Governance - Experience with risk management, compliance, and governance in cloud environments. - Able to design validation and rollback strategies for complex migrations. - Familiar with quality assurance approaches: test automation, regression testing, performance benchmarking. - Understanding of security, privacy, and regulatory requirements for cloud workloads. Leadership & Consulting - Proven track record leading small, senior technical teams in a services or platform context. - Comfortable influencing architecture and execution across multiple squads/tribes, even without direct reporting lines. - Strong storytelling and communication skills; able to explain complex migration strategies in clear, non-buzzword-heavy language. - Experience in consulting, professional services, or customer-facing technical roles is a strong plus. - Demonstrated ability to engage with customer executives, participate in RFPs, and build compelling proposals for cloud migration services. Nice-to-Have - Background in one of the target domains (application modernization, data modernization, or cloud security). - Certifications in major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). - Experience developing or contributing to open-source migration tools or frameworks.