The DevOps Architect is responsible for defining and driving the end-to-end DevOps strategy, tooling, and practices for mission-critical, on-premises and hybrid applications. This role designs and oversees CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, environment strategy, and observability to ensure that applications are built, tested, released, and operated in a reliable, secure, and repeatable manner across multiple data centres and DR sites. The DevOps Architect works closely with application, infrastructure, security, and operations teams to enable seamless modernization of legacy systems into containerized and microservices-based architectures, while maintaining strict uptime, performance, and compliance requirements. 

• Define the overall DevOps architecture, standards, and practices for building, testing, releasing, and operating applications across multiple on-premises environments.
• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines (for example, using Azure DevOps or Jenkins) for Java, .NET, front-end, GIS, database systems and integration services, ensuring automated build, test, security scanning, and deployment.
• Lead the DevOps enablement for modernization of legacy applications into microservices and containerized workloads, ensuring coexistence with existing monolithic and legacy stacks during the transition.
• Design deployment strategies (for example, blue-green, canary, rolling updates) suitable for mission-critical, 24×7 systems running in multi-datacenter and DR setups with strict SLAs.
• Define and implement infrastructure-as-code (IaC) standards (for example, Terraform, Ansible) for provisioning and managing infrastructure, middleware, Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters, and shared services in a consistent, repeatable way.
• Collaborate closely with Application, Integration, Database, Infrastructure, Security, and Network teams to ensure that pipelines, deployment patterns, and operational processes align with existing on-prem standards, DR strategies, and compliance requirements.
• Establish and enforce configuration management practices (for example, environment-specific configurations, secrets management, feature flags) across all environments.
• Define and implement logging, monitoring, and alerting standards (for example, ELK/EFK, Prometheus, Grafana, APM tools) to ensure observability of applications, services, and infrastructure.
• Drive adoption of DevSecOps practices by integrating security checks (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, container scanning) into CI/CD pipelines and release processes.

Technical Skills

• Strong hands-on experience with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps Pipelines, Jenkins, or GitLab CI for automating build, test, and deployment workflows.
• Proficiency with source control and branching strategies (for example, GitFlow, trunk-based development) and integration with work item/issue tracking.
• Solid experience with containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes/OpenShift in on-premises or hybrid environments.
• Practical knowledge of infrastructure-as-code tools (for example, Terraform, Ansible) for provisioning and configuring compute, storage, networking, and platform services.
• Strong understanding of Linux-based environments, shell scripting, and automation for application and infrastructure operations.
• Experience with centralized logging and monitoring stacks (for example, Elastic Stack/ELK/EFK, Prometheus, Grafana) and APM tools (for example, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic).
• Good understanding of networking fundamentals relevant to DevOps (for example, load balancers, ingress controllers, DNS, certificates, firewall rules, service mesh concepts).

Experience and Soft Skills

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, build and release engineering, or infrastructure engineering, with at least 3–4 years in a lead/architect role.
• Proven experience implementing DevOps practices for large-scale, distributed, mission-critical systems with strict uptime and performance SLAs.
• Experience working in environments with multiple data centres and DR sites, including supporting failover, recovery testing, and environment synchronization.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work closely with architects, developers, testers, infrastructure, security, and operations teams.
• Ability to document DevOps architectures, pipelines, standards, and operational runbooks clearly and consistently.

SHOULD HAVE

Responsibilities

• Define environment strategy and naming conventions and ensure consistent topology, tagging, and baseline configurations across multiple environments.
• Implement automated quality gates in CI/CD pipelines, including unit tests, integration tests, security checks, code coverage, and policy compliance checks.
• Work with Security teams to align DevSecOps practices with organizational policies and compliance requirements, including auditability and evidence collection for releases.
• Drive continuous improvement of build and deployment times, pipeline reliability, and overall development productivity.
• Contribute to and review operational runbooks, incident response procedures, and DR playbooks from a DevOps and automation perspective.

Technical Skills

• Experience integrating artifact repositories (for example, Nexus, Artifactory, Azure Artifacts) with CI/CD pipelines to manage build outputs and dependencies.
• Familiarity with service mesh or advanced traffic management concepts (for example, Istio, Linkerd, API gateways) as part of blue-green/canary deployment strategies.
• Working knowledge of security tools and scanners (for example, SonarQube, OWASP ZAP, Snyk, Trivy, Aqua, or similar) integrated with CI/CD.
• Knowledge of scripting/programming languages used for automation (for example, Bash, PowerShell, Python, or Groovy).

Experience

• Prior involvement in modernization projects where legacy applications were incrementally migrated to microservices and containers while maintaining business continuity.
• Experience coordinating releases across multiple teams and systems, including change management and release governance in regulated or high-security environments.

Technical Skills and Experience

• Exposure to cloud platforms (for example, Azure, AWS) and hybrid DevOps patterns (on-prem plus cloud) even if current deployment is primarily on-premises.
• Experience with GitOps approaches using tools like Argo CD or Flux for Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Familiarity with SRE practices (for example, error budgets, SLOs/SLIs, reliability engineering) and how they tie into monitoring and alerting design.
• Experience with secrets management tools (for example, HashiCorp Vault, Key Management Services) and policy-as-code tools (for example, Open Policy Agent, Azure Policy).