Lead Cloud Engineering and Production Operations Engineer

Lead Cloud Engineering and Production Operations Engineer
This role acts as a hands-on technical lead, driving cloud engineering initiatives, automating infrastructure, and ensuring high-availability and performance across customer-facing systems. The Lead Engineer will collaborate with IT, DevOps, and Software Engineering teams to build secure, scalable environments that support continuous delivery and rapid innovation.

Reporting to the Associate Director of IT and Infrastructure, this position combines deep technical execution with mentoring responsibilities-balancing architectural vision with day-to-day operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities:

Cloud Infrastructure and Engineering

• Design, deploy, and manage hybrid and cloud infrastructures (OCI, AWS, Azure, on-prem) to support production and enterprise systems
• Implement infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using Terraform or CloudFormation to ensure repeatable, secure, and automated deployments
• Develop and maintain CI/CD-ready environments that support rapid build, test, and release cycles for engineering teams
• Partner with network and security teams to implement resilient, compliant architectures

• Serve as technical lead for production systems, ensuring stability, performance, and scalability
• Establish monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks to improve visibility and reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and resolution (MTTR)
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and reliability improvement efforts
• Collaborate with Engineering and SRE teams to define SLIs, SLOs, and performance metrics for critical services

• Develop and enhance deployment pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, ArgoCD) to automate software delivery and environment provisioning
• Embed security, compliance, and testing gates into CI/CD workflows
• Implement configuration management and orchestration tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to manage infrastructure at scale
• Drive efficiency through self-healing systems, auto-scaling, and infrastructure automation

• Lead day-to-day production operations activities, mentoring junior engineers on cloud and reliability best practices
• Act as a technical bridge between Infrastructure, Security, and Application Engineering teams
• Contribute to capacity planning, cost optimization, and production readiness reviews
• Maintain documentation, runbooks, and standard operating procedures for production systems

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of experience in cloud and infrastructure engineering, with at least 2-3 years in a lead or senior engineer capacity
• Deep expertise in OCI (preferred) AWS or Azure (networking, compute, storage, IAM, and monitoring)
• Proven experience with production-scale operations and hybrid cloud deployments
• Proficiency in:
  
  • Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
  • CI/CD and DevOps pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab, ArgoCD)
  • Containers and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
  • Observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)
  • Scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell)

• Strong troubleshooting skills and the ability to lead through high-impact incidents
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across cross-functional teams

• Experience supporting high-availability SaaS or production environments
• Knowledge of FinOps, cloud governance, and cost optimization practices
• Familiarity with DevSecOps principles, Zero Trust, and automated compliance frameworks
• Exposure to AI/ML pipeline infrastructure or high-throughput data systems