Principal DevOps Engineer (PeopleFluent)

Accountabilities:: The Principal DevOps Engineer will own the technical evolution, automation, reliability, and operational effectiveness of the hosting infrastructure. Key responsibilities include: Own and maintain PeopleFluent hosting pipelines and infrastructure automation. Define the technical vision and architecture for hosting infrastructure across compute, networking, and platform services. Ensure infrastructure architecture supports long-term scalability, security, reliability, maintainability, and cost-effectiveness. Proactively identify opportunities to optimize infrastructure performance, capacity, reliability, and operational efficiency. Take a hands-on role in scaling, securing, and improving hybrid infrastructure environments. Design and operate infrastructure spanning on-premises data centers and AWS. Collaborate with engineering and product teams to understand requirements and translate them into robust infrastructure solutions. Evaluate technical options and clearly communicate architecture decisions, constraints, and trade-offs. Lead complex infrastructure projects from planning and design through implementation and operational adoption. Establish and maintain structured processes for infrastructure changes, releases, deployments, and configuration management. Use Git-based workflows, including branching, pull requests, and code reviews, to govern infrastructure changes. Maintain and improve monitoring and observability capabilities across infrastructure and applications. Mentor engineers and share technical expertise across hosting and infrastructure domains. Contribute to the development of scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-effective hosting solutions. Requirements The role requires extensive infrastructure engineering experience, strong architectural judgment, and deep hands-on knowledge across cloud, Linux, networking, virtualization, automation, and observability. Candidates should demonstrate: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. 10+ years of professional industry experience. Strong experience with Enterprise Linux, including SELinux policies, standard configurations, enforcement, and headless server administration. Strong networking fundamentals, including DHCP, subnetting, VLANs, network segmentation, and related concepts. Hands-on experience with virtualization platforms such as Proxmox and/or VMware vSphere. Experience with advanced virtualization cluster configuration, virtual switches, VLANs, and network segmentation. Experience owning and administering observability and monitoring platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent technologies. Strong Git and shell scripting skills. Extensive hands-on experience with AWS services including EC2, S3, RDS, and Route 53. Experience provisioning, orchestrating, and administering infrastructure using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes. Experience implementing release and deployment automation with Jenkins. Strong understanding of infrastructure-as-code and automated infrastructure management. Experience managing configuration changes through structured change-control processes. Familiarity with Git-based development and infrastructure workflows, including branching, pull requests, and code reviews. Strong problem-solving and analytical skills with a proactive, self-starting approach. Ability to collaborate effectively with engineering and product teams. Strong communication skills, particularly when explaining complex technical decisions and trade-offs. Ability to operate at both strategic architectural and hands-on engineering levels. Additional experience that would be valuable includes: Data center operations, including automated network-switch configuration. Automation of basic firewall rules and network security controls. Database administration across Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and/or Microsoft SQL. Experience with Elasticsearch and Kafka. Experience working in Agile and Scrum environments. Background in web-based or SaaS environments. Experience working in startup or fast-paced technology environments. Benefits Full-time position. Fully remote role for candidates based in India. Senior-level ownership of hybrid infrastructure spanning on-premises data centers and AWS. Opportunity to shape the architecture and technical direction of enterprise hosting infrastructure. Hands-on exposure to AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, virtualization, and observability technologies. Opportunity to work across compute, networking, platform services, security, scalability, and reliability. Ability to lead complex infrastructure initiatives from design through implementation. Opportunity to contribute to modern, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective hosting solutions. Collaboration with engineering and product teams in a technically driven environment. Opportunity to mentor other engineers and develop subject matter expertise across infrastructure domains.