Director - Infra Engineering - Platform Security and Lifecycle Management

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the enterprise strategy and roadmap for Enterprise PaaS platform using Redhat Openshift and Data Middleware platform upgrades and lifecycle management.
• Leverage Gen AI/Agentic AI to drive a fully automated pipeline for platform provisioning, upgrades, patching, and configuration management.
• Own end-to-end upgrade planning, governance, risk assessment, and execution.
• Establish upgrade readiness processes, validation frameworks, rollback strategies, and post-upgrade monitoring.
• Coordinate with application teams to ensure platform compatibility and minimize business disruption during upgrades.
• Manage lifecycle risks associated with OpenShift, Kubernetes, operating systems, middleware, and supporting infrastructure.
• Track and report platform currency and technology lifecycle compliance metrics.

Security & Compliance

• Establish and maintain a strong security posture across clusters and supporting infrastructure.
• Lead vulnerability management, container image security, platform hardening, patch management, and remediation efforts.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security policies, regulatory requirements, and industry standards.
• Partner with Information Security and Risk teams to manage security assessments, audits, and remediation activities.
• Manage security exceptions and risk acceptance processes while driving long-term remediation strategies.

Capacity & Performance Management

• Own capacity planning and forecasting for Platform, including compute, memory, storage, and network resources.
• Develop predictive capacity models to support business growth and application onboarding.
• Establish monitoring and reporting processes for cluster utilization, performance, and scalability.
• Optimize infrastructure consumption and platform efficiency while maintaining service-level objectives.
• Lead resource optimization initiatives to improve workload density and reduce infrastructure costs.

Leadership & Team Management

• Build and lead high-performing cloud native DevOps engineers, Kubernetes administrators, security specialists, and capacity planners.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, continuous learning, innovation, and accountability.
• Mentor leaders and technical experts within the organization.
• Drive workforce planning, succession planning, and talent development initiatives.

Stakeholder & Vendor Management

• Serve as the senior technology leader for Private Cloud platform services.
• Partner with application development, architecture, security, infrastructure, and business leaders to align platform capabilities with organizational priorities.
• Manage relationships with key vendors, managed service providers, and strategic partners.
• Present platform health, upgrade status, security posture, risks, and capacity forecasts to executive leadership.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred).
• 8+ years of experience in Platform Engineering & Operations, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform lifecycle management with a proven track record of leading teams in managing large-scale cloud infrastructure with a focus on automation, reliability and resilience.
• Deep hands-on experience with any Kubernetes platform(multi-cloud preferred).
• Strong experience with: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM), Infrastructure automation tools like Ansible, Container platforms (OpenShift/Kubernetes), Monitoring tools (Prometheus, OTEL, LOKI), CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), Open source based messaging, caching, and database technologies like Kafka, Redis, Elastic.
• Strong understanding of cloud networking, security, and architecture.
• Experience managing large-scale, mission-critical production environments.
• Relevant certifications preferred.
• Experience with DevOps practices and methodologies, including CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Splunk, ELK, Dynatrace.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to troubleshoot complex issues and drive resolution in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams and influence decision-making at all levels of the organization.