Technical Lead - Email Perimeter Security

Job Summary

Core Responsibilities

• Work directly with stakeholders to gather requirements
• Define end-to-end technical solutions
• Integrate legacy email gateway infrastructure with modern automation and observability frameworks
• Apply SRE and AI Ops concepts to improve reliability and reduce MTTR
• Engineer and modernize next-generation secure, highly available, and mission-critical email perimeter infrastructure.
• Provide architectural assurance and governance for messaging and email security initiatives across environments.
• Implement security controls and hardened configurations to manage operational and cyber risk exposure.
• Partner with IT Security and Risk teams to ensure compliance with enterprise security standards and regulatory expectations.
• Develop automated metrics reporting, observability dashboards, and health monitoring frameworks for SMTP infrastructure.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents and drive systemic remediation.
• Create, review, maintain, and publish technical documentation, automation runbooks, and knowledge base articles.
• Support large-scale SMTP gateway operations including traffic management, authentication enforcement, queue monitoring, and TLS configuration management.
• Work with a globally distributed engineering team to analyze, design, and implement automation solutions to eliminate operational toil and reduce manual intervention.
• Transform legacy systems into: Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Configuration as Code, Monitoring as Code using standardized enterprise automation frameworks.
• Design and implement anomaly detection, alerting strategies, and fault isolation mechanisms to improve platform reliability and reduce MTTR.
• Use AIOps for Data Aggregation, Anomaly Detection, Root Cause Analysis, Automation, Predictive Analytics for Faster Incident Resolution, Lower Operational Costs, Improved Observability and Proactive Management

Qualifications and Skills

Infrastructure protocols such as DNS, LDAP, NTP, SNMP, SMTP and email-related protocols and standards (SMTP, DMARC, DKIM, SPF)

• Hands-on experience managing DNS records supporting mail flow.
• Practical implementation of:
  • SPF record design
  • DKIM signing and key rotation
  • DMARC policy enforcement (none/quarantine/reject)
• Experience troubleshooting authentication alignment failures.
• Understanding large-scale SMTP relay and gateway architectures.
• Strong understanding of Linux networking stacks and TCP/IP fundamentals.
• Deep knowledge of SMTP protocol internals and mail flow lifecycle.
• Experience managing spam filtering engines and policy tuning.
• Knowledge of email hygiene, content filtering, and threat detection.
• Familiarity with enterprise email security products (e.g., Proofpoint, Fortinet).
• Understanding of secure email gateway architecture and threat mitigation controls.
• Hands-on troubleshooting of DNS resolution, LDAP integration, and SSL/TLS handshake issues.
• Familiarity with NTP, SNMP, and enterprise network architectures.

Programmer mindset with familiarity with Agile principles and DevOps practices

• 5+ years scripting in Python and/or Bash.
• Ability to build automation frameworks and tooling.
• Experience writing maintainable, modular scripts for operational automation.
• Comfortable debugging production scripts and improving reliability.
• Minimum 3+ years building production-grade automation using Ansible.
• Ability to design reusable roles, playbooks, and modular automation.
• Proven experience implementing DevOps best practices.
• Experience embedding automation into build and deployment pipelines.
• Strong understanding of SRE concepts including: SLIs, SLOs, Error budgets, Observability design

• Familiarity with Agile principles
• Experience working within structured SDLC environments.
• Strong Git-based version control practices.
• Experience integrating automation and configuration management into CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with Jenkins or equivalent CI tools.

Soft Skills

• Strong ownership mindset in production-critical environments.
• Ability to operate independently with minimal supervision.
• Effective communicator across global teams.
• Strong documentation and design articulation capability.
• Mentorship ability for junior engineers.
• Proactive, self-driven learner with analytical problem-solving skills.

Preferred Professional Experience

• Bachelor's degree in information technology, MIS, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of RHEL/Linux system administration in enterprise environments.
• Deep SMTP and email authentication expertise (DMARC, DKIM, SPF)
• 5+ years Hands-on experience in automation (Ansible, Python) and AIOps
• Experience leading architecture discussions and cross-functional teams
• Good to have hands on experience on AIOps such as natural language processing and machine learning models to automate, streamline and optimize IT service management and operational workflows.
• Experience developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining software and automation pipelines using SDLC management systems such as Git, Jira, ALM, and Jenkins.
• Experience operating and engineering large-scale SMTP email gateway environments with high availability requirements.
• SME in enterprise email security platforms such as Proofpoint, Cisco ESGA and/or Fortinet.
• Proficiency in networking, DNS architecture, LDAP integration, and SSL/TLS encryption standards.
• Prior experience in regulated industries, or other mission-critical 24x7 production environments preferred.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams, driving architectural decisions, and mentoring junior engineers in mission-critical environments.