AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.
At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived.
We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.
The Technical Team Lead – Managed Services (Public Cloud) serves as a strategic technical leader, trusted advisor, and subject matter expert across Public Cloud technologies, Platform Engineering, DevOps, Automation, and Cloud Operations. This role is responsible for leading the design, implementation, support, and continuous improvement of enterprise-grade cloud solutions while driving operational excellence and ensuring exceptional customer outcomes. As a Team Lead, the individual provides both technical and people leadership, overseeing a team of cloud engineers
responsible for delivering managed services across multi-cloud environments. The role requires balancing hands-on technical expertise with team management, stakeholder engagement, service delivery governance, and strategic planning.
The Technical Team Lead acts as the primary escalation point for complex technical issues, ensuring rapid resolution of critical incidents while maintaining service availability, reliability, security, and performance. Collaborate closely with customers, executive stakeholders, architects, engineering teams, project managers, and business leaders to align technology initiatives with organizational objectives. They will drive the adoption of cloud-native architectures, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automation frameworks, DevOps and DevSecOps practices, FinOps principles, and operational best practices to improve efficiency, scalability, and business value.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the successful delivery of cloud transformation, modernization, automation, and managed services engagements, ensuring projects are completed on time, within scope, and to the highest quality standards.
- Design and implement complex, mission-critical, enterprise-scale solutions across public cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and other cloud ecosystems.
- Serve as the primary technical escalation point and trusted advisor for clients, partners, and internal teams.
- Build and maintain strong client relationships, identify growth opportunities, and support upselling and cross-selling initiatives through technical leadership and solution innovation.
- Collaborate with client stakeholders to understand business and technical challenges and develop tailored cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering solutions.
- Develop and present solution architectures, technical strategies, roadmaps, and executive-level presentations to engineering teams and senior leadership.
- Create and maintain technical roadmaps, innovation plans, governance standards, and best practices for supported environments.
- Lead technical discovery workshops, architecture reviews, whiteboarding sessions, and strategic planning discussions with customers.
- Provide project estimation, resource planning, risk identification, mitigation planning, and technical oversight throughout the project lifecycle.
- Mentor, coach, and develop engineers by providing technical guidance, career development support, and knowledge sharing opportunities.
- Drive adoption of cloud-native architectures, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), DevOps, DevSecOps, platform engineering, and application modernization practices.
- Promote collaboration across technical communities and contribute to internal innovation, standards development, and continuous improvement initiatives.
- Ensure adherence to security, compliance, operational excellence, and reliability standards across all client engagements.
- Remain current with emerging cloud technologies, industry trends, and best practices, and provide thought leadership across the organization.
Advanced Troubleshooting (Broad AWS Coverage. Azure, GCP would be added advantage)
- Compute: EC2 (AMI baking, Spot, Graviton), Lambda (concurrency, VPC), ECS/EKS (Fargate, Karpenter), Batch, Outposts.
- Storage: S3 (lifecycle, replication, Event Notifications), EBS (io2 Block Express, snapshots), EFS, FSx (ONTAP, Lustre), Storage Gateway, Backup.
- Database: RDS (Aurora, Multi-AZ, read replicas), DynamoDB (GSI, DAX, Streams), DocumentDB, Neptune, ElastiCache (Redis/Memcached).
- Networking & Content Delivery: VPC (peering, TGW, Network Firewall), Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, Route 53 (health checks, latency routing), CloudFront, Global Accelerator, API Gateway.
- Security, Identity & Compliance: IAM (policies, SCPs, permissions boundaries), KMS, Secrets Manager, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Macie, Certificate Manager, WAF, Shield.
- Management & Governance: AWS Organizations, Control Tower, CloudTrail, Config, Trusted Advisor, Service Quotas, License Manager.
- Analytics: Athena, Redshift, EMR, Kinesis (Data Streams, Firehose), MSK, QuickSight, OpenSearch Service.
- AI/ML & Serverless: SageMaker, Bedrock, Rekognition, Comprehend, AppFlow, Step Functions, EventBridge.
- Developer Tools: CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, Cloud9, X-Ray.
Team Leadership & Knowledge Sharing
- Technical Leadership
- Cloud Architecture & Strategy
- Client Relationship Management
- Platform Engineering
- DevOps & DevSecOps
- Infrastructure Automation
- Enterprise Solution Design
- Mentoring & Team Development
- Stakeholder Management
- Strategic Planning & Innovation
- Risk Management & Governance
- Executive Communication & Presentation
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of overall IT industry experience, including 8+ years of hands-on experience in Cloud, DevOps, Automation, and Platform Engineering.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical discussions and whiteboarding sessions with customers to solve complex business and technology challenges.
- Strong consulting mindset with proven business acumen and customer-facing leadership experience.
- Expert-level knowledge of AWS and/or Microsoft Azure cloud platforms, including architecture, operations, governance, security, and cost optimization.
- Hands-on experience designing and implementing core cloud services, including Compute, Storage, Networking, Databases, Identity & Access Management, Containers, and Security solutions.
- Deep experience leading transformational initiatives such as Cloud Migration, Cloud Transformation, Platform Engineering, DevOps, DevSecOps, and Application Modernization.
- Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation tools including Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, ARM Templates, or equivalent technologies.
- Strong experience with CI/CD platforms and deployment automation tools such as GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Harness, Azure DevOps, or similar technologies.
- Expert understanding of Git workflows, source control management, and branching strategies.
- Strong expertise in Kubernetes, containers, microservices, and cloud-native application architectures.
- Comprehensive understanding of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Agile methodologies, DevSecOps practices, and continuous delivery frameworks.
- Excellent communication, presentation, stakeholder management, and interpersonal skills.
- Proven ability to resolve critical incidents in large-scale environments (include SLA metrics).
- Familiar with ITIL-style problem management and blameless post-mortems.
- Lead triage, diagnosis, and resolution of critical (P1/P2) incidents across the AWS ecosystem.
- Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and deliver customer-facing post-mortem reports with actionable prevention plans.
- Coordinate with Technical Account Managers (TAMs), Service Teams, and customer stakeholders during live outages.
Qualifications
- Customer-facing role for a minimum of 5+ years
- 4+ years designing, securing, and deploying large-scale applications and solutions
- Experience with one of the major cloud vendor environments (development, access, migration)
- Effectively communicate with, and present to all levels of the organization
- Subject matter expert in at least one major cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP)
- Architect level development skills in at least one development language
- Strong skills integrating third party tools and solutions
- Strong project and situational awareness
- Strong attention to detail
- Self-starter
- Well organized
- Able to travel as required
AI / GenAI Knowledge Requirements
- Basic understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Generative AI concepts.
- Exposure to AWS AI/ML services such as Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Rekognition, Comprehend, Textract, or Lex.
- Understanding AI-assisted operations, automation, and observability tools.
- Awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and AI governance/security best practices.
- Ability to support AI/ML workloads on cloud infrastructure including GPU-enabled environments.
- Familiarity with integrating AI services into DevOps and cloud automation workflows is an added advantage.
Recognized Technical Expertise
- Proven skills in multiple billable technologies (as measured by certification/approved training completion/proven abilities)
- Recognized subject matter expert in professional discipline
- Depth of knowledge and experience enables contribution in a more complex/critical environment
- Contributions often exceed the full requirements of the expected competencies relative to one’s current job title
Lead vs Contribute
- Can participate with and lead a team of technical delivery resources across skillsets within a practice to help achieve customer’s business goals and technology needs
- Can participate in and lead written deliverable creation across areas of expertise
- Provides measurable input into AHEAD new products, processes, standards, and / or plans
- Able to provide time estimates for work that needs to be accomplished based on the available information
- Coordinates cross-practice and can contribute to cross-practice deliverables using current templates
- Self-starter in finding work during non-scheduled work hours
- Prioritizes and completes tasks independently on-time or ahead of schedule
- Able to lead development and testing activities
- Achieve high team standards. Contributes to the refinement of methodology and best practices to establish quality and effectiveness
- Initiate and participate in authoring PCR requests when additional work is being requested
Architect Skills
- Depth and demonstrated expertise across at least one technology
- Able to architect and lead deployment of moderately complex solutions related to cloud solutions
- Understands performance, scaling and functional characteristics of software technologies
- Ability to understand open-source and cloud use-cases, and recommend standard design patterns commonly used in such solutions (best practices)
Certifications – good to have
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (Preferred) • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (Preferred) • Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert • HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) • AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty (Good to Have) • Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer (Good to Have)
Communications (verbal and written)
- Communicates with external customers, which may include senior management, on matters that require explanation, interpretation, and/or advising
- Often exceeds expectations with respect to customer expectations (communications, meets commitments, etc.)
- Able to work with outside vendors on internal or customer related issues
- Participate in pre-sales activities including scoping, positioning, technology adoption and maturation
- Able to identify new client opportunities inside of the POD and communicate those to upper management including the Team Lead
- Can communicate beyond tactics and technology and can help customers management set strategic direction
- Can write and lead complex deliverables within the practice
- Ability to understand and translate customer requirements into technical requirements
Leadership and Influence
- Works to influence direct team members, broader internal team, and external customers, to agree and accept new concepts, best practices, and approaches
- Advises and trains more junior staff via mentorship while helping to drive the entire AHEAD platform
- A reliable resource for marketing on thought leadership pieces for their practice for AHEAD and our customers
- Has started speaking at industry conferences and/or webinars
- Contributes to more complex workshops and understands how their area of expertise fits into our stitching message
- Accepts responsibility for own actions and sometimes those of others as part of a team
- Works well with immediate, extend and external teams, a true team player
- Consistently meets expectations in terms of customer facing, writing, presentation and problem-solving skills and requires little to no supervision in this area
- Consistently exhibits a positive attitude towards AHEAD and its customers
- Willing to go the extra mile when asked to do so (i.e., time outside of normal working hours to support a customer initiative, production roll-out, could also be > 40 hours for short intervals)
- Consistently pursues self-development and drives the AHEAD business model for self and sometimes others on the team
- Highly respected by peers and sales team
Culture
- Support initiatives beyond area of responsibility
- Encourage cross team interaction
- Motivate people to think creatively
- Achieve success through others
Why AHEAD:
Through our daily work and internal groups like Moving Women AHEAD and RISE AHEAD, we value and benefit from diversity of people, ideas, experience, and everything in between.
We fuel growth by stacking our office with top-notch technologies in a multi-million-dollar lab, by encouraging cross department training and development, sponsoring certifications and credentials for continued learning.
India Employment Benefits include:
Comprehensive health insurance coverage for employees, with options to extend coverage to dependents
Paid time off and company holidays, along with additional leave benefits as per policy
Flexible work arrangements, supporting work-life balance
Learning and development opportunities to support continuous growth and upskilling
Employee wellness initiatives and programs focused on physical and mental well-being
Retirement and statutory benefits in line with India regulations
Inclusive and people-first culture, with a strong focus on collaboration and ownership
