Lead Platform Engineer (Contract, Remote)

Engagement: Contract, initial 6 months, extendable on performance and renewal

Location: Remote, India-based (Pune preferred, so we can work closely together)

Overlap: 2 to 3 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time

We are hiring a hands-on Lead Platform Engineer for one of our US-based clients, an established product company running a modern cloud platform at scale. Their applications, APIs, integrations and reporting all sit on top of this infrastructure, and this role owns its reliability and guardrails.

This is a player-coach role. You will operate AWS and Kubernetes for real, own Airflow as a shared service, sharpen deployment and observability standards, run incident response, and lead a small senior platform team (2 to 3 engineers). Direction-setter and doer, both.

What you will actually do:

• Design, build and support production cloud infrastructure, deployment and runtime patterns
• Run and improve AWS: networking, IAM, load balancing, DNS, compute, storage, managed databases
• Own EKS/Kubernetes runtime: ingress, service identity, secrets, config, observability, safe deploys
• Own Airflow as a platform service: reliability, retries, failure handling, backfills, support
• Drive reliability through SLOs, monitoring, alerting, incident response and honest postmortems
• Work with Security and Compliance on IAM, secrets, access control and audit in a compliance-aware environment
• Partner with the client's CTO on durable platform architecture and cut avoidable complexity

The stack:

AWS, EKS/Kubernetes, RDS/Aurora, SQS, Redis/ElastiCache, S3, VPC, ALB/NLB, Route 53, IAM. Airflow for orchestration. CloudWatch, Freshping and HyperDX (or similar) for observability. GitHub, CI/CD, Jira, Confluence. Application side is Java/Spring Boot and Python. You do not need every tool, but AWS, EKS, Airflow, CI/CD and production support must be second nature.

What we are looking for:

• 7+ years hands-on engineering, with strong time in platform, DevOps, SRE or cloud infrastructure
• 3+ years as a technical lead, staff/principal engineer or platform lead
• Deep production AWS experience across networking, IAM, load balancing, DNS, compute and databases
• Strong Kubernetes/EKS experience: cluster ops, deployments, ingress, secrets, observability
• Real Airflow (or similar orchestration) ownership in production
• Solid on monitoring, alerting, incident response, runbooks, SLOs and operational readiness
• Enough technical weight to earn trust in architecture, deployment and incident reviews

Nice to have: experience in a compliance-aware or regulated environment (SOC 2, data privacy, auditability); IRSA or EKS Pod Identity experience; GitOps and deployment-hygiene improvements; experience with offshore or contractor teams.

About working with us:

VidyaMohan is a Pune-based software consultancy. We work with clients across different domains and project types, from greenfield builds to migrations and long-running platforms, so a good contractor with us can grow across more than one engagement over time. We are small and we are straight with people. We value honesty, sincerity, hard work and ownership over noise and buzzwords. The person we want is calm when things are on fire, fixes the root cause instead of the symptom, and leaves the system better documented than they found it.

To apply, please answer the screening questions. Applications without answers will not be reviewed.