Job Description - Senior Practice Lead (Cloud & DevOps)Role Title: Senior Practice Lead - Cloud & DevOps
Experience: 15+ years of relevant experience
Location: Bengaluru, India
Business Unit: UST FinX
Domain: Banking & FinTech (Products & Platforms - US & Europe)
Employment Type: Full Time
Reporting To: FinX Technology / Engineering Leadership
Job Objective
UST FinX is seeking a Senior Practice Lead - Cloud & DevOps to own and govern the delivery of FinX banking and fintech products and platforms by institutionalizing best in class Cloud, DevOps, DevSecOps, and Cloud Security practices.
This role is accountable for ensuring that all product and platform deliveries meet banking grade expectations for security, reliability, scalability, compliance, operational excellence, and cost efficiency, while accelerating time to market for customers in the US and Europe.
The Practice Lead will operate at the intersection of delivery management, technology leadership, and engineering governance, working closely with product engineering teams, cloud architects, security teams, SREs, and client stakeholders. The individual will define standards, drive consistency across deliveries, manage risks, and ensure cloud platforms are secure, compliant, resilient, and audit ready at all times.
Key Responsibilities
1) Delivery Ownership & Governance
Own end to end delivery governance for Cloud & DevOps aspects across all UST FinX products and platforms.
Ensure consistent adoption of cloud, DevOps, and security best practices across delivery teams.
Act as the final authority for cloud readiness, release readiness, and operational readiness before production go lives.
Define and enforce delivery guardrails, engineering KPIs, and quality metrics (DORA, SLOs, security SLAs).
2) Cloud & DevOps Practice Leadership
Establish and mature the Cloud & DevOps practice within UST FinX.
Define practice strategy, standards, playbooks, reusable assets, and accelerators.
Lead and mentor Cloud Engineers, DevOps Engineers, SREs, and Platform teams across multiple programs.
Partner with delivery and product leadership to align cloud capabilities with business outcomes.
3) Cloud Architecture & Platform Enablement
Govern cloud platform architectures on AWS and/or Azure for regulated banking workloads.
Ensure adoption of standardized landing zones, identity models, network segmentation, and governance policies.
Oversee Kubernetes/container platforms (EKS/AKS) and cloud native service usage.
Promote platform engineering and self service enablement for product teams.
4) DevOps & CI/CD Excellence
Ensure standardized, secure, and scalable CI/CD pipelines across all FinX products.
Drive DevOps maturity across teams covering: Automated builds, testing, deployments, and rollbacks
GitOps based deployment models
Release governance and environment promotion strategies
Align DevOps processes with banking change management and audit requirements.
5) Cloud Security & DevSecOps
Own Cloud Security posture for FinX platforms in partnership with Security and Risk teams.
Ensure DevSecOps practices are embedded into delivery: SAST, DAST, dependency and container scanning
Secrets management and secure configuration
Policy as code and compliance automation
Ensure platforms are audit ready with traceability, logging, and evidence generation.
6) Reliability, SRE & Operations
Institutionalize SRE practices across platforms: SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets
Incident management, RCA, postmortems
Ensure high availability, DR readiness, backup/restore strategies, and resilience testing.
Drive improvements in MTTR, availability, and platform stability.
7) Financial Governance (FinOps)
Establish FinOps governance for FinX platforms: Cost visibility, tagging standards, budgets, optimization
Drive cost efficient cloud usage without compromising security or performance.
Partner with finance and delivery teams for forecasting and cost accountability.
8) Client & Stakeholder Engagement
Act as the Cloud & DevOps delivery leader in client interactions, reviews, and audits.
Engage with US and Europe stakeholders to address delivery risks, compliance concerns, and platform scalability.
Provide leadership during production incidents, audits, and regulatory reviews.
Mandatory Skills & Qualifications
Experience & Leadership
15+ years of experience in IT, with strong focus on Cloud, DevOps, and Platform delivery.
Proven experience leading large scale delivery programs in banking, financial services, or fintech environments.
Strong people leadership experience managing multi disciplinary teams.
Cloud Platforms
Deep expertise in AWS and/or Azure: Secure landing zones, IAM, networking, governance
HA/DR and multi region architectures
Experience delivering regulated workloads on cloud platforms.
DevOps & Platform Engineering
Strong experience with CI/CD platforms (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab).
Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and native cloud IaC tools.
Kubernetes and container platform governance (EKS/AKS).
GitOps, release orchestration, and environment standardization.
Cloud Security & DevSecOps
Strong understanding of cloud security controls: IAM, encryption, secrets management, WAF, network security
Hands on experience embedding security into pipelines and delivery workflows.
Familiarity with audit, compliance, and regulatory delivery expectations in BFSI.
Observability & Reliability
Experience implementing observability and monitoring standards: Metrics, logs, traces, ing
Strong understanding of incident management, DR, and operational readiness.
Banking / FinTech Domain
Experience delivering banking or fintech platforms with high expectations for: Security, compliance, uptime, and scalability
Experience working with global clients, especially US and Europe regions.
Communication & Governance
Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
Ability to influence senior leadership, architects, and delivery teams.
Good to Have Skills
Advanced Cloud & Architecture
Multi cloud or hybrid cloud delivery experience.
Serverless and managed service modernization.
Event driven architectures and streaming platforms.
Security & Compliance
Exposure to security and compliance frameworks: ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, GDPR, NIST concepts
Software supply chain security practices (SBOM, artifact signing).
FinOps & Business Alignment
Strong FinOps experience including forecasting and chargeback models.
Experience aligning cloud spend with product P&L or unit economics.
Platform & Developer Experience
Internal developer platforms and self service portals (e.g., Backstage).
Focus on developer productivity and experience improvements.
Pre Sales & Strategy
Experience contributing to solutioning, estimations, and RFPs.
Ability to translate delivery capabilities into client facing value propositions.
