Platform Reliability & Operations Lead

Job Title: Platform Reliability & Operations Lead

Location: Dallas, TX
Work Mode: Onsite
Experience: 20+ Years
Leadership Experience: 5+ Years leading reliability or operations teams

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly experienced Platform Reliability & Operations Lead to drive reliability, production operations, service stability, and operational excellence across enterprise cloud, data, integration, and analytics platforms.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), enterprise platform architecture, major incident management, change governance, automation, observability, and disaster recovery. This role requires a strong technical leader capable of managing critical production incidents, coordinating cross-functional teams, improving platform resilience, and communicating effectively with senior executives and business stakeholders.

Experience across Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Snowflake, Databricks, integration platforms, and visualization technologies is highly desirable.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end reliability and operational excellence across enterprise cloud infrastructure, data platforms, integration services, and analytics environments.

• Understand enterprise platform architecture across Azure, GCP, Snowflake, Databricks, integration, and visualization platforms.

• Define and manage service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level agreements (SLAs), operational metrics, and platform reliability targets.

• Lead Major Incident Management (MIM), independently drive incident resolution, and coordinate technical teams during business-critical production disruptions.

• Conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA), implement Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA), and drive problem management to prevent recurring incidents.

• Manage incident communications and provide clear, timely updates to senior executives, business stakeholders, IT leadership, and vendors.

• Govern production changes through Change Advisory Board (CAB) reviews, risk assessments, implementation planning, and rollback strategies.

• Drive preventive maintenance, proactive monitoring, observability, and platform health management.

• Implement self-healing automation, AIOps capabilities, and automated incident detection and remediation.

• Lead capacity planning, disaster recovery readiness, resilience testing, and business continuity initiatives.

• Partner with FinOps teams to optimize cloud consumption, identify cost anomalies, and improve platform resource utilization.

• Establish operational governance, cross-vendor support processes, and operational level agreements (OLAs).

• Mentor and coach L2/L3 support engineers and establish operational best practices across platform teams.

• Track and improve KPIs, including SLA adherence, change success rate, Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), incident recurrence, platform availability, and cost optimization.

Required Skills and Qualifications

• 20+ years of experience in Platform Operations, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), infrastructure engineering, or enterprise technology operations.

• 5+ years of experience leading platform reliability, SRE, or production operations teams.

• Strong expertise in architecting and administering enterprise-scale Azure IaaS, PaaS, data, and integration platform solutions.

• Strong knowledge of Azure services, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), networking, identity, RBAC, and security controls.

• Experience with enterprise data and analytics platforms, including Databricks, Apache Spark, Snowflake, Tableau, and Power BI.

• Experience with integration technologies such as Informatica and Kafka.

• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems.

• Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, and AppDynamics.

• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Terraform-based automation.

• Knowledge of AIOps, self-healing automation, proactive monitoring, and operational resilience.

• Extensive experience with ITIL/ITSM processes, Major Incident Management, RCA, CAPA, Problem Management, Change Management, and CAB governance.

• Strong experience in capacity planning, disaster recovery, business continuity, platform performance, and cloud cost optimization.

• Excellent leadership, stakeholder management, executive communication, and cross-vendor coordination skills.

Leadership Expectations

• Maintain an operations-first and automation-driven approach to platform reliability.

• Lead critical incidents independently and drive resolution through an end-to-end understanding of enterprise platform architecture.

• Communicate technical issues, business impact, remediation plans, and recovery timelines clearly to senior executives.

• Establish governance routines, operational standards, and cross-vendor accountability.

• Coach L2/L3 engineers and promote continuous improvement in reliability, automation, and service delivery.

Preferred Certifications

• ITIL v4 certification.

• Microsoft Azure certifications.

• Databricks certifications.

• Additional cloud, SRE, Kubernetes, or platform engineering certifications are desirable.

Performance Metrics

Success in this role will be measured by:

• SLA/SLO adherence and platform availability.

• Reduction in MTTR and recurring production incidents.

• Production change success rate and reduced change-related incidents.

• Effectiveness of RCA/CAPA and preventive maintenance.

• Improved automation, self-healing, and operational efficiency.

• Timely resolution of cost anomalies and improved resource utilization.