Senior Engineer, Defect Management & DevOps at AHEAD

As a Senior Engineer (L3) specializing in Defect Management & DevOps, you will play a critical role in driving operational excellence, ensuring defect-free delivery pipelines, and strengthening reliability across cloud-native platforms. You will collaborate closely with engineering, QA, SRE, and product teams to manage end-to-end defect processes, streamline automation, and enhance service observability. The role demands deep analytical capability, strong DevOps experience, and the ability to influence cross-functional improvements through data-driven insights and advanced troubleshooting.  You will act as a subject matter expert (SME) in DevOps and GCP/AWS, overseeing end-to-end release processes, governance, and delivery pipelines. This role requires leadership, deep technical knowledge, and excellent communication skills. Core Responsibilities • Serve as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for cloud platforms, primarily AWS (GCP exposure is a plus), providing guidance on cloud best practices, architectural decisions, and solution design. • Support customers with core Managed Services technologies, including Cloud, Automation, Terraform, CI/CD, and containerization. • Design, implement, and optimize cloud-native and DevOps solutions aligned with customer and organizational objectives. • Lead technical discussions, demos, and customer engagements while effectively communicating complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. • Assist with team-building activities such as interviewing, onboarding, and aligning technical resources. • Provide technical leadership, coaching, and mentorship to junior team members. • Maintain strong project and situational awareness to ensure deliverables meet timelines and organizational expectations. • Develop high-quality documentation including architectures, workflows, runbooks, and other written deliverables. • Act as a technical expert in internal knowledge-sharing initiatives and external client interactions. • Influence cloud governance, operational policies, best practices, and process improvements across teams and customer environments. • Ensure precision, accuracy, and strong attention to detail across all tasks and deliverables. Requirements • Act as the SME for Defect Management processes, governance, tooling, and reporting. • Own and manage the full defect lifecycle, including logging, triage, prioritization, RCA, corrective actions, and closure. • Partner with Development, QA, SRE, and Product teams to ensure timely resolution of high-impact issues. • Establish and maintain defect dashboards, KPIs, and trend analytics to drive quality and process improvements. • Develop standardized runbooks, escalation workflows, and operational procedures for defect handling. • Lead cross-team Root Cause Analysis (RCA) investigations and drive Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA) implementations. • Improve operational readiness through enhanced monitoring, alerting, and structured incident-to-defect workflows. • Provide guidance on CI/CD optimization, automation strategies, infrastructure stability, and reliability engineering. • Mentor junior engineers in DevOps principles, tooling, defect analysis techniques, and troubleshooting best practices. Requirements • Defect Management Expertise • Full ownership of defect lifecycle ensuring SLA adherence. • Deep understanding of SDLC, change management, and ITIL best practices. • Ability to analyze defect patterns, severity trends, root causes, and long-term systemic issues. • Conduct structured RCA using 5 Why’s, Fishbone, Fault Tree Analysis. • Define and enforce severity, categorization, and prioritization standards. • Create dashboards and quality metrics to drive continuous improvement. • Tools & Skills: • Strong JIRA workflow, automation rule, dashboard, and reporting expertise. • Ability to visualize defect trends and quality metrics effectively. • Observability, Monitoring & SIEM Tools • Hands-on experience with Dynatrace, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar tooling. • Skilled in APM analysis, log correlation, anomaly detection, service mapping, and performance troubleshooting. • Build and maintain dashboards and alert frameworks. • Integrate monitoring insights with DevOps and operational workflows. • Exposure to SIEM event analysis for operational and security correlation. Core DevOps Responsibilities • Build, enhance, and support CI/CD pipelines across multiple environments using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and Git-based workflows. • Collaborate on automation initiatives using Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, or equivalent IaC tools to standardize and streamline deployments. • Deploy and manage AWS cloud-native services including EKS, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, S3, IAM, and supporting architectures. • Work with containers and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, EKS, ECS, and AKS (where required). • Implement deployment best practices such as blue/green, rolling updates, and automated rollback strategies to ensure safe, repeatable releases. • Troubleshoot complex deployment issues, environment drift, infrastructure failures, performance bottlenecks, and service-level degradations. • Implement and maintain observability using CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Dynatrace, or equivalent monitoring stacks. • Ensure AWS workloads adhere to resiliency, compliance, security, and operational excellence guidelines. • Strong hands-on, production-grade DevOps experience in AWS (primary cloud). • Deep expertise in Kubernetes, containerized workloads, microservices, autoscaling, and cloud networking. • Advanced troubleshooting across AWS services, distributed systems, CI/CD pipelines, and API-driven workflows. • Knowledge of AWS cost optimization, tagging, FinOps alignment, and resource lifecycle governance. • Exposure to building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines within GCP ecosystems (Cloud Build, GKE, Artifact Registry, etc.). • Ability to work with GCP cloud-native services where required, ensuring consistency across hybrid/multi-cloud deployments. • Familiarity with GCP IAM, VPC architecture, and core compute/storage/networking components is a plus. General Qualifications • Strong communication, leadership, and mentoring capabilities. • 6–10+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, QA Engineering, or Cloud Operations. • Expert-level AWS knowledge (GCP exposure would be a plus). • Strong command of IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK. • Experience with CI/CD systems: Jenkins, GitLab CI, AWS CodePipeline. • Proficiency with Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration. • Experience with monitoring technologies: Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus. • Experience with JIRA workflows and project tracking. • Ability to excel in dynamic, fast-paced environments. Expectations • Demonstrate deep expertise across DevOps, cloud platforms, automation, and engineering practices. • Balance hands-on delivery with leadership responsibilities and strategic initiatives. • Continuously assess, refine, and enhance processes, documentation, and operational workflows. • Adapt effectively to evolving customer requirements, project priorities, and technology landscapes. • Engage confidently with senior stakeholders, providing clear communication and technical guidance. • Lead scoping, planning, and methodology definition for major technical initiatives and transformations. • Contribute to the development of new engineering standards, frameworks, and best practices across teams. • Take senior-level ownership of critical defects, escalations, and operational issues, driving them to resolution. • Influence and drive cross-team improvements in tooling, quality, automation, and operational efficiency. • Ensure prevention mechanisms, automation guardrails, and reliability practices are embedded early in delivery cycles. • Lead initiatives focused on defect prevention, observability enhancements, and overall DevOps maturity uplift. • Participate in on-call rotations and provide Tier-3 technical expertise for complex issues. • Continuously propose, design, and implement enhancements across tooling, automation, and operational frameworks.