Role Overview: The Practice Head for the DevOps Practice at Happiest Minds Product and Digital Engineering Services will be responsible for leading, growing, and innovating the DevOps practice to meet the evolving needs of our clients. This leadership role will focus on enhancing operational agility, improving delivery performance, and fostering a culture of automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement within both the organization and our clients ecosystems. The Practice Head will manage teams across various customer engagements, ensuring a consistent, high-quality approach to DevOps implementation. This individual will work closely with senior leadership and cross-functional teams to develop and execute strategies that drive the adoption of DevOps principles across cloud-native platforms, microservices architectures, and modern software delivery pipelines.
Key Responsibilities:
Practice Building & Growth:
- Build and lead a strong DevOps team by hiring, mentoring, and growing talent.
- Develop partnerships with major cloud and technology providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.).
- Support sales and pre-sales teams in shaping DevOps solutions and proposals.
- Identify new service opportunities and help expand the DevOps portfolio.
DevOps Strategy & Technical Leadership:
- Define and drive the DevOps roadmap aligned with the company's engineering and digital services goals.
- Promote modern DevOps practices such as CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, cloud-native platforms, and automation.
- Guide teams to improve build, deployment, and monitoring processes across projects.
Operational Excellence & Service Delivery:
- Ensure high-quality delivery of DevOps services across customer engagements.
- Oversee implementation and adoption of DevOps tools and platforms for clients.
- Improve automation, containerization, and cloud operations practices.
- Create reusable frameworks, templates, and accelerators to improve consistency and speed of delivery.
Client Relationship Management:
- Work with key clients to understand their challenges and recommend suitable DevOps solutions.
- Act as a trusted advisor for DevOps transformation and best practices.
- Review project performance regularly to ensure delivery is on time, on budget, and meets quality expectations.
Metrics & Continuous Improvement:
- Track key DevOps metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, and change failure rate.
- Drive initiatives to reduce manual effort, improve reliability, and increase delivery speed.
- Keep up to date with DevOps trends and introduce relevant improvements to the practice.
Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement:
- Work closely with other practice leaders, engineering teams, and leadership to integrate DevOps with development, testing, and security.
- Enable collaboration between development, operations, security, and QA teams
Experience:
- 20+ years of experience in software engineering, IT operations, or related technical roles, with several years in a DevOps or cloud leadership role.
- Experience leading DevOps initiatives, including automation and CI/CD implementation across projects or programs.
- Strong working knowledge of public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Good experience with containers and orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
- Practical exposure to Infrastructure as Code and automation tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, or similar).
Industry Exposure
- Experience in one or more domains such as Healthcare, Retail, Media, or Manufacturing is a plus.
Technical Skills
- Strong understanding of common DevOps tools and practices (e.g., Git, Jenkins, CI/CD, containers, monitoring).
- Experience with cloud-native and microservices-based architectures.
- Working knowledge of Agile and IT service management practices.
Leadership & Collaboration
- Experience leading and mentoring technical teams.
- Ability to work with business and technology stakeholders across levels.
- Good communication and influencing skills with customers and senior leaders.
Core Competencies:
- Customer Focus:Strong orientation towards client success and satisfaction.
- Passion for Innovation:An intrinsic drive for identifying and implementing the latest technology trends in DevOps.
- Accountability:Proven ability to take ownership of practice results and drive performance improvement.
- Collaboration:Strong interpersonal skills to foster teamwork across diverse teams.
- Results-Oriented:Focused on delivering measurable outcomes for clients and the business.
Qualifications & Skills:
Education:Bachelor's/master's degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related field
