Lead DevOps Engineer / Senior DevOps Engineer

Senior technical leader driving cloud-native, provider-agnostic infrastructure strategy across hybrid environments (Proxmox VE on-prem, hyperscaler cloud, GCP minority cloud). Balances technical direction with people leadership, ensuring systems are portable, resilient, secure, cost-optimized, and developer-friendly.

Responsibilities:

Infrastructure Leadership

• Architect hybrid infrastructure spanning on-premises and multi-cloud.
• Define provider-agnostic standards to avoid lock-in.
• Own IaC strategy with Terraform multi-provider modules.
• Lead disaster recovery, HA, SLA/SLO governance.

On-Premises Infrastructure (Proxmox VE)

• Manage Proxmox clusters, HA groups, VM/LXC provisioning.
• Govern storage (ZFS, Ceph, NFS/iSCSI) and SDN.
• Integrate with IaC/GitOps workflows.
• Operate Proxmox Backup Server, enforce RTO/RPO.
• Use Proxmox as compute layer for Kubernetes clusters.
• Monitor via Prometheus/Grafana, enforce CIS security baselines.

Cloud-Native Platform Engineering

• Standardize Kubernetes runtime across environments.
• Drive GitOps-first delivery (ArgoCD/Flux).
• Use Helm/Kustomize for packaging.
• Adopt OpenTelemetry for observability.
• Enforce service mesh (Istio, Cilium, Linkerd).
• Apply policy-as-code (OPA, Kyverno).
• Design provider-agnostic CI/CD pipelines.

Multi-Cloud Strategy

• Select providers based on workload/cost, not inertia.
• Manage GCP for analytics/Kubernetes.
• Onboard additional providers (Alibaba, OCI, Hetzner, etc.) seamlessly.
• Enforce cross-cloud networking via WireGuard/Tailscale.
• Centralize identity federation via OIDC/SAML.

Internal Developer Platform (IDP)

• Own IDP as a product with roadmap and SLAs.
• Provide self-service provisioning across environments.
• Enable ephemeral environments on demand.
• Maintain service catalog/developer portal (Backstage, Port.io).
• Enforce RBAC/policies via OPA/Kyverno.
• Measure DevEx via DORA metrics and adoption rates.

FinOps & Cost Governance

• Treat cloud spend as engineering concern.
• Use provider-agnostic FinOps tooling (Kubecost, OpenCost).
• Apply per-provider governance (AWS/Azure RIs, GCP CUDs, Proxmox TCO).
• Integrate billing APIs into unified dashboards.

People Management & Leadership

• Lead platform engineers around cloud-native teams.
• Build skills in open-source tech (Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus).
• Develop FinOps and DevEx champions.
• Advocate ROI of cloud-native investment.

Strategic & Cross-Functional

• Own infrastructure roadmap.
• Make workload placement decisions based on cost, latency, compliance.
• Partner with Security/Compliance/Engineering for unified governance.

Qualifications:

Required Skills

• Cloud-Native Platform: Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize, GitOps.
• IaC & Automation: Terraform, Ansible, Packer, Crossplane.
• Networking/Service Mesh: Istio, Cilium, Linkerd, WireGuard, OVS.
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, ELK.
• Policy & Security: OPA, Kyverno, Vault, DevSecOps.
• On-Prem (Proxmox VE): Cluster mgmt, HA, ZFS, Ceph, PBS, SDN.
• Cloud Providers: AWS/Azure (primary), GCP (minority).
• IDP Tools: Backstage, Port.io, Humanitec.
• CI/CD: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Tekton.
• FinOps: Kubecost, OpenCost, CloudHealth.
• Languages/Scripting: Python, Bash, Go, Terraform HCL, TypeScript.
• Leadership: Team management, roadmap planning, stakeholder communication.

Plus Skills

• Experience integrating non-hyperscaler clouds (Alibaba, OCI, Hetzner, Cloudflare, Huawei, IBM).
• Ability to rapidly onboard providers into cloud-native stack.

Nice to Have – AI-Powered Automation

• AI-assisted IaC generation (Terraform Copilot, Pulumi AI).
• AIOps for observability (Grafana ML, Elastic AIOps).
• AI-powered runbook automation (LangChain, OpenAI).
• ChatOps with AI for infra queries and cost summaries.
• Autonomous infra agents for natural language provisioning.

Key KPIs

• Cloud-native adoption rate (% workloads on Kubernetes).
• IDP adoption rate (% teams using self-service).
• Developer onboarding velocity.
• Deployment frequency & lead time (DORA metrics).
• Proxmox cluster availability ≥99.9%.
• Provider portability score (% workloads redeployable cross-cloud).
• Multi-cloud + on-prem cost savings.
• MTTR for production incidents.