About This Opportunity
Metantz partners with some of Bangalore's most ambitious product startups and scale-ups to place senior technical leaders who can drive transformational change. We are sourcing seasoned Lead DevOps experts for high-growth companies where infrastructure isn't a support function - it's a strategic differentiator. If you've spent years in the trenches, have the scars to prove it, and are now ready to shape the technical direction of an entire engineering organisation - this is the role for you.
What You'll Be Doing
Architecture & Technical Strategy
- Define the long-term infrastructure and platform vision - cloud architecture, DevOps toolchain, and delivery philosophy - aligned with 3–5 year product roadmaps
- Architect enterprise-grade, multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments with a focus on resilience, global scale, and operational efficiency
- Own the technology selection process for infrastructure, DevOps tooling, and observability platforms - evaluating build vs. buy decisions with business context
- Lead infrastructure modernisation programmes - legacy migration, cloud-native transformation, or monolith-to-microservices transitions at the platform layer
- Design data infrastructure and pipeline architecture in collaboration with data engineering teams - storage, streaming, and lakehouse patterns
Platform Engineering & Developer Experience
- Conceptualise and lead the build of a fully-fledged Internal Developer Platform (IDP) - self-service infrastructure, golden paths, and paved roads for engineering teams
- Define platform SLAs and ensure the IDP becomes a force multiplier for 50–500+ engineers
- Drive adoption of Platform Engineering as a product discipline within the organisation
- Own the developer experience (DevEx) strategy - reducing cognitive load, improving local dev environments, and standardising tooling across teams
Security, Governance & Compliance
- Own the enterprise security architecture from a DevSecOps lens - zero-trust networking, identity federation, secrets lifecycle, and vulnerability management at scale
- Lead regulatory and compliance programmes - SOC2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, or industry-specific standards - with infrastructure as the foundation
- Establish governance frameworks for cloud resource provisioning, cost accountability, and change management across multiple teams and environments
- Define and enforce policy as code using tools like OPA, Sentinel, or AWS SCPs across the organisation
Reliability & Chaos Engineering
- Define the organisation's reliability engineering philosophy — SLOs, error budgets, and toil reduction targets at a company-wide level
- Introduce and lead chaos engineering practices — GameDays, failure injection, and resilience testing as a standard part of the engineering lifecycle
- Own disaster recovery and business continuity planning — RTO, RPO targets, runbook governance, and regular DR drills
- Architect global traffic management and failover strategies for multi-region production systems
Leadership, Mentorship & Org Building
- Build and lead DevOps, Platform Engineering teams - hiring, structuring, and growing 5–20 person teams from early-stage to maturity
- Act as the principal technical voice in CTO and board-level conversations on infrastructure investment, risk, and capability building
- Define career ladders, competency frameworks, and growth paths for DevOps and SRE engineers across the organisation
- Partner with product, engineering, and finance leadership to align infrastructure spend with business outcomes - FinOps at a strategic level
- Represent the company in technical communities, conferences, and open-source ecosystems to attract top talent and build brand credibility
What We're Looking For
Must-Have
- 9–14 years of progressive experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering with at least 3–4 years in an architect or principal-level role
- Deep, battle-tested expertise across AWS, GCP, or Azure - including advanced networking, multi-account governance, landing zones, and managed services at scale
- Proven experience architecting Kubernetes platforms at scale - multi-cluster federation, custom operators, admission controllers, and cluster lifecycle management
- Mastery of Infrastructure as Code at an organisational scale - Terraform modules, monorepo strategies, policy enforcement, and drift detection
- Hands-on experience leading or significantly contributing to a Platform Engineering or IDP initiative
- Strong background in DevSecOps - integrating security into the SDLC at an architectural level, not as an afterthought
- Demonstrable track record of leading and growing engineering teams - not just being a strong individual contributor
- Experience working in or with product startups or scale-ups where speed, pragmatism, and ownership culture matter
Good to Have
- Multi-cloud architecture experience with a real production use case - not just theoretical knowledge
- Experience with eBPF-based networking or observability (Cilium, Tetragon, Pixie)
- Hands-on contributions to open-source projects in the CNCF or broader DevOps ecosystem
- Exposure to AI, ML infrastructure - GPU clusters, model serving infrastructure, MLOps pipelines, or LLMOps
- Prior experience as a founding engineer or Head of Infrastructure at a startup
- Published technical writing, conference talks, or a recognised community presence
What Makes a Strong Candidate
- You think in systems and second-order effects - you anticipate how today's architecture decision affects the team two years from now
- You've built organisations, not just systems - you know that the best infrastructure is only as good as the team maintaining it
- You can translate infrastructure complexity into business language - risk, cost, speed, and reliability framed for non-technical stakeholders
- You have strong opinions, loosely held - you advocate for your architecture but adapt when the context changes
- You've navigated high-growth chaos - you know what good enough for now looks like and when to pay down technical debt
- You leave things better than you found them - teams, codebases, runbooks, and culture
What's In It For You
- Architect-level roles at Series A to Series C product companies with real engineering scale challenges
- Direct partnership with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and founding teams - your decisions will matter
- Equity participation at companies with strong growth trajectories
- Opportunity to build teams and shape culture - not just maintain infrastructure
- Access to Metantz's exclusive network of 50+ innovative startups across Bangalore and beyond
- Competitive, market-leading compensation benchmarked against top product companies
