Job Description

As a DevOps Engineering Lead at SMBC, you'll combine hands-on platform engineering with technical leadership to build and maintain the infrastructure foundation for our digital banking transformation in Asia Pacific. This role balances deep technical work (at least 50% hands-on) with team leadership, focusing on CI/CD automation, cloud infrastructure, platform reliability, and developer productivity. You'll own the entire DevOps roadmap while remaining deeply technical, writing infrastructure-as-code, building pipelines, and solving complex platform challenges. Your work will directly enable engineering teams to deploy with confidence and velocity, requiring both deep DevOps expertise and the ability to mentor and develop a high performing team.

• Platform Ownership: Define and execute the complete DevOps strategy for SMBC's digital banking platform in Asia Pacific
• Hands-on Leadership: Remain deeply technical (at least 50% hands-on) while leading an expert DevOps engineering team
• Infrastructure Innovation: Build cloud-native infrastructure on Azure that enables rapid, reliable deployments at scale
• Developer Experience: Create tools and platforms that dramatically improve engineering team productivity

Platform Engineering & Infrastructure

• Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure on Azure (or AWS/GCP), leveraging cloud-native services and patterns
• Own the complete CI/CD pipeline strategy - from code commit to production deployment with zero-downtime releases
• Implement Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, ARM templates, or similar tools for repeatable, version-controlled infrastructure
• Build and maintain containerization and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes/AKS)
• Design and implement comprehensive observability: metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting across all systems
• Establish security best practices, compliance controls, and automated security scanning in the deployment pipeline

Reliability & Performance

• Own platform SLAs and work to continuously improve system reliability, availability, and performance
• Build automated testing and validation into deployment pipelines to catch issues before production
• Implement disaster recovery strategies and conduct regular DR testing
• Performance tune infrastructure and applications, identifying and resolving bottlenecks
• Create and maintain runbooks for incident response and system operations

Developer Productivity & Tooling

• Build self-service platforms and tools that empower development teams to deploy and manage their services
• Create and maintain developer documentation, including onboarding guides and infrastructure usage patterns
• Implement automated environments (dev, staging, production) with consistent configuration
• Establish golden paths and platform standards that make the right way the easy way

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Mentor and develop an expert DevOps engineering team, providing technical guidance and career development support
• Conduct regular 1:1s and create an individual development plan for your direct report
• Lead by example - write production code, participate in on-call rotations, and debug complex issues
• Evangelize DevOps best practices across engineering teams through documentation, demos, and pair programming
• Collaborate closely with the Lead Engineer and other technical leads on cross-platform initiatives

Stakeholder Management

• Communicate infrastructure roadmap and technical initiatives to engineering leadership
• Translate business requirements into infrastructure capabilities and timelines
• Partner with security, compliance, and infrastructure teams on enterprise integrations
• Present platform metrics and improvements to senior leadership

Requirements:
Technical Expertise
Must demonstrate high proficiency in at least 3 of the following areas:

• Cloud Platforms: 7+ years of hands-on experience with Azure (preferred) or AWS/GCP, including deep knowledge of cloud-native services
• CI/CD & Automation: Expert-level experience building and maintaining complex CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps)
• Infrastructure as Code: Strong experience with Terraform, ARM templates, CloudFormation, or similar IaC tools
• Container Orchestration: Production experience with Docker and Kubernetes/AKS, including cluster management and service mesh
• Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in Python, Bash, PowerShell, or Go for automation and tooling
• Observability: Experience implementing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, Application Insights)
• Security & Compliance: Understanding of cloud security best practices, secrets management, and compliance frameworks
• Networking: Strong grasp of cloud networking, VPNs, load balancers, API gateways, and DNS

Leadership & Management

• 5+ years of technical leadership experience with direct reports or as a senior DevOps/platform engineer
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and develop engineering talent in DevOps practices
• Experience managing performance and providing career guidance to team members
• Proven ability to balance significant hands-on work (60%+) with leadership responsibilities

Professional Qualities

• Strong systems thinking - ability to see how components interact and design for reliability
• Excellent troubleshooting skills - can quickly diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure issues
• Automation-first mindset - strong bias toward automating repetitive tasks
• Clear communicator who can explain complex infrastructure concepts to developers and non-technical stakeholders
• Growth mindset with continuous learning of new cloud services and DevOps practices
• Comfortable with being on-call and responding to production incidents

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience in banking, financial services, or highly regulated industries
• Experience with banking-specific compliance requirements (PCI-DSS, SOC 2)
• Understanding of infrastructure requirements for digital channels in corporate/institutional or wealth management/private banking business domains
• Experience building platform engineering teams from early stages
• Contributions to open source DevOps tools or active participation in DevOps communities
• Experience with GitOps practices and tools (ArgoCD, Flux)

Skills Required