Lead DevOps Engineer

skit· Technology
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📍 Bangalore, KA, IndiaFULL TIME

About this role

Job Title: Lead DevOps Engineer
Location: Bengaluru (100% WFO)
Job Type: Full-time

The problem
Skit.ai runs autonomous voice agents for regulated enterprises — India's largest banks and telcos, and US collections operations. Every call is a live distributed system: PSTN/SIP → media server → ASR → LLM → TTS → back, spread across three clouds and multiple vendors, with a conversational response budget measured in hundreds of milliseconds.
The platform peaks at roughly **1 million calls per hour**. Billed minutes grew **5,000x+ in eight months**. At this scale, infrastructure is not a support function — latency, cost-per-minute, and auditability are product features. When infra degrades, a customer mid-sentence hears silence.

We're hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to own this substrate and keep it ahead of the growth curve.

What you'll own:
  • Multi-cloud substrate:  Production infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Private interconnects (Direct Connect, Cloud Interconnect, ExpressRoute), transit/hub-spoke topologies, and cross-cloud latency managed as an explicit budget — p95 per hop in tens of milliseconds, not "best effort."
  • Real-time media plane: Self-hosted LiveKit and SIP infrastructure at scale. Media servers are stateful; you'll design session-affine, event-driven autoscaling (KEDA-class) that survives traffic tripling within an hour.
  • Model-serving infrastructure: GPU fleets (A100/H100/B200-class) for self-hosted ASR and open-weight LLMs — inference optimization, prefix caching, sticky-session routing, sub-500ms TTFT budgets — alongside managed APIs (Vertex AI/Gemini, Bedrock, Azure). Vendor failover is your design, not your incident.
  • Reliability & observability: OTel-native tracing (Grafana/Tempo stack), per-turn latency attribution across telephony/ASR/LLM/TTS, automated incident response and self-healing. You'll act as incident commander for infrastructure and write the runbooks you'd want at 3 a.m.
  • Cost engineering: Cost-per-minute is an SLO here. We cut per-minute serving cost ~18x in six months through caching, rightsizing, autoscaling, and workload re-architecture — you'll own the next 10x.
  • Security & compliance: Zero Trust across clouds: private endpoints/PrivateLink, IAM/RBAC, secrets management with rotation, WAF/DDoS protection. Operate controls for SOC 2 and ISO/IEC 27001; working command of ISO/IEC 42001:2023 (AI management systems) — hands-on preferred, rigorous theoretical grounding acceptable. You'll face bank and telecom auditors directly, including data-residency requirements.
  • Technical leadership: Terraform-first IaC standards, production-readiness reviews, mentoring SREs. "Lead" means you raise the floor of the whole team.

Problems on our plate right now
  • Scaling stateful, self-hosted media servers past current concurrency ceilings — HPA on CPU doesn't cut it
  • Migrating LLM inference from managed APIs to self-hosted open-weight models on GPUs without breaking TTFT budgets
  • ASR, LLM, and telephony living in different clouds: interconnect topology that keeps the packet path short and private
  • Multi-region DR that satisfies bank audits without doubling spend
If these read as interesting rather than terrifying, keep reading.
Must-have
  • 6+ years  hands-on cloud infrastructure; 3+ years operating multiple clouds simultaneously in production; deep expertise in at least two of AWS/GCP/Azure
  • Real-time audio/video systems in production — WebRTC, SIP/PSTN, or streaming media; you've debugged jitter, not just read about it
  • Networking depth: VPC/VNet design, load balancing, DNS, NAT; private connectivity (Direct Connect / Cloud Interconnect / ExpressRoute, PrivateLink / Private Service Connect); transit gateways and cross-cloud mesh
  • Kubernetes at scale (EKS/GKE/AKS), Helm, and scaling *stateful* workloads; service mesh familiarity (Istio/Linkerd)
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (non-negotiable) across multi-account/multi-project estates; drift is a bug
  • AI/ML serving in production: GPU allocation and scheduling, inference servers or serverless GPU platforms (vLLM / Triton / Modal / Baseten-class), streaming protocols (WebRTC, WebSocket, gRPC)
  • Production STT/TTS/LLM API operations: streaming integrations, quota management, multi-vendor failover (Deepgram / Google / Azure / Whisper-class ASR; ElevenLabs / Azure-class TTS)
  • Security fundamentals: IAM/RBAC, secrets management (Vault or cloud-native), encryption and key rotation
  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions or GitLab CI with security scanning integrated into the pipeline

Strong signal (nice-to-have)
  • LiveKit, pipecat, Twilio, or comparable real-time platforms; SIP trunking and PSTN integration
  • KEDA or other event-driven autoscaling used in anger
  • MLOps: model versioning, canary and A/B rollout
  • FinOps discipline: reserved/spot strategy, unit-economics reporting
  • Certifications: AWS SA Professional, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert
  • ISO/IEC 42001:2023 exposure
What we're NOT looking for
  • Single-cloud depth with documentation-level knowledge of the other two
  • Tool-checklist DevOps without production AI/ML serving scars
  • "Can learn quickly" as the primary qualification — this role needs day-one production credibility
  • Anyone who has never traced a packet across a cloud boundary

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the salary disclosed for the Lead DevOps Engineer position at skit?
The salary for this Lead DevOps Engineer role at skit is not publicly listed. Click "Apply Now" to learn more about the compensation package on their official careers page.
Where is the Lead DevOps Engineer position at skit located?
This Lead DevOps Engineer role at skit is based in Bangalore, KA, India. The position is listed as on-site or hybrid. Check the full job description or apply directly to confirm the work arrangement.
Is the Lead DevOps Engineer role at skit full-time or part-time?
This is listed as a FULL TIME position. It is posted as a Lead DevOps Engineer role in the Technology department at skit.
Which team or department does the Lead DevOps Engineer at skit belong to?
This Lead DevOps Engineer position is part of the Technology department at skit. See the full job description for more information about the team structure and responsibilities.
How do I apply for the Lead DevOps Engineer position at skit?
Click the "Apply Now" button on this page. You will be redirected to skit's official application portal hosted on keka where you can submit your application directly.
When was the Lead DevOps Engineer job at skit posted?
This Lead DevOps Engineer position at skit was posted on Sep 7, 2026. Apply as soon as possible — early applications are often reviewed first.
Lead DevOps Engineer
skit
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