Lead - IT Operations

📋 Description

• • Own the global IT Operations function for a 4,000-person SaaS company that is re-defining how businesses use software—eliminating the “blocker” reputation and replacing it with delightful, growth-enabling experiences.
• • Architect and run a 24×7, cloud-first infrastructure stack (AWS, Azure, GCP) that supports 50,000+ customers in 120+ countries with 99.99 % uptime, while cutting operational cost per seat by 30 % over the next 18 months.
• • Lead a distributed team of 25 engineers, SREs, and DevOps specialists across Chennai, San Mateo, Berlin, and Sydney; coach them to become a world-class, metrics-driven organization that ships 400+ production changes per month with zero customer-facing incidents.
• • Drive the ITIL-based incident, problem, change, and capacity-management processes; own the post-mortem culture that turns every outage into a public knowledge base article and a permanent fix within 72 hours.
• • Modernize legacy on-prem footprints into fully automated, infrastructure-as-code environments using Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes; achieve SOC-2 Type II, ISO-27001, and GDPR compliance without slowing release velocity.
• • Partner with Product Engineering to embed observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry) into every micro-service so that MTTR drops below 5 minutes and customer NPS climbs above 70.
• • Negotiate and manage a $12 M annual technology budget—hardware, software, SaaS, and cloud spend—delivering 20 % YoY savings through reserved-instance strategies, vendor consolidation, and FinOps governance.
• • Design and execute a Zero-Trust security architecture that protects 2 PB of customer data; run quarterly red-team exercises and maintain <0.5 % critical-severity open tickets at any time.
• • Build self-service portals and chatbots that deflect 60 % of internal IT tickets, freeing the team to focus on high-impact automation and customer-centric innovation.
• • Champion diversity and inclusion: ensure every hiring panel has balanced representation, mentor under-represented minorities, and sponsor internal “Women in TechOps” circles.
• • Report directly to the CIO and present monthly to the executive staff; translate technical KPIs (availability, latency, cost per transaction) into business outcomes (ARR protection, churn reduction, expansion revenue).
• • Spearhead green-IT initiatives—optimize data-center energy usage, migrate to ARM-based instances, and publish an annual carbon-reduction report that aligns with Science-Based Targets.
• • Create a culture of continuous learning: fund certifications (CKA, AWS Pro, SRE), run internal guilds, and maintain an internal tech blog that receives 10,000+ monthly views.
• • Influence the product roadmap by feeding real-world operability data back to engineering, ensuring that every new feature ships with auto-scaling, multi-region failover, and cost-aware design patterns.
• • Be the public face of Freshworks IT Operations—speak at re:Invent, KubeCon, and SREcon, publish case studies, and attract top-tier talent who want to solve problems at planetary scale.