Head - SRE at Skillz in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Job description

• We are hiring a hands-on engineering leader to lead the Infrastructure and Security domain. This role is critical in ensuring our infrastructure can scale with and support product development needs across the company.

Responsibilities

• Team leadership across time zones. Lead and grow the DevOps and SRE functions across Las Vegas and Bengaluru. Build self-sustaining pods with clear on-call ownership and no single points of failure.
• Platform reliability. Own SLAs and incident response end-to-end. Drive mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-resolve down. Serve as the escalation owner for P0/P1 events.
• Infrastructure architecture reviews. Partner with product engineering teams on system design and architecture decisions. Review proposed architectures for scalability, reliability, and security implications before implementation. Establish a lightweight review process that accelerates rather than gates product delivery.
• Infrastructure cost ownership. Hold the Infra Opex budget. Identify and execute cloud spend reductions (EBS cleanup, right-sizing, reserved capacity, migration initiatives) targeting $250k+ in annualised savings based on the ROI.
• Developer productivity. Own the CI/CD platform, dev environment tooling, and deployment pipeline reliability. Measurably improve the mean time to deploy for product engineering teams.
• Security and compliance liaison. Partner with Legal and Finance on SOX and PCI DSS obligations. Translate regulatory requirements into infrastructure and application security controls.
• Technical mentorship. Provide day-to-day guidance to engineers. Create a culture of operational rigour, blameless post-mortems, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Deep AWS expertise — EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, cost tooling (Cost Explorer, Savings Plans)
• Kubernetes at scale — service mesh (Istio), microservices deployment patterns, cluster lifecycle management
• Observability stack ownership — Datadog, Prometheus, distributed tracing (Jaeger/X-Ray), log aggregation
• CI/CD platform ownership — ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, deployment pipeline reliability
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals — failure mode analysis, SLO design, capacity planning
• Security and compliance fluency — PCI DSS, SOX controls, application security architecture
• Leadership across global teams — asynchronous communication, on-call design, hiring across time zones
• Demonstrated cost optimisation track record with measurable cloud spend outcomes
• Clear communication with the executive and cross-functional stakeholders
• 15+ years of infrastructure engineering experience with public cloud at scale
• 5+ years running Kubernetes workloads in production (EKS preferred)
• Proven track record in building or overhauling observability stacks for large-scale distributed systems
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD frameworks (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or equivalent)
• Track record leading infra reliability initiatives with measurable, quantified outcomes
• Comfortable debugging complex distributed systems and reading application code in Go, Python, or Java
• Prior budget ownership or Opex accountability preferred
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, with the ability to effectively engage and influence senior leadership stakeholders.
• Gaming or fintech experience (real-money, regulated environment preferred)
• Experience working with geographically distributed engineering teams
• Experience building 0→1 teams or standing up functions from scratch

Skills

Required

• Leadership across global teams
• Kubernetes
• Istio
• Datadog
• Prometheus
• Jaeger/X-Ray
• ArgoCD
• GitHub Actions
• Go
• Python
• Java

Benefits

• Culture of Impact: Join a united team of builders, creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs driven by the desire to win. At Skillz, we create value, obsess over our product, and make a difference in the world.
• Comprehensive Benefits: Enjoy peace of mind with our comprehensive benefits package, which includes 100% coverage for medical, dental, and vision expenses for both you and your dependents.
• Wellness Support: Enhance your well-being with our array of wellness initiatives, including meditation and mental health resources, physical fitness coaching and classes, family planning assistance, health and parenting guidance, virtual therapy sessions, and more.
• Recognized Success: Skillz has earned recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, CNBC's Disruptor 50, San Francisco Business Times' Best Places to Work, Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups, and the #1 fastest-growing company in America on the Inc. 5000 list, and many more.
• Development Opportunities: We hold our employees to high standards while providing them with professional growth opportunities. We operate like a startup, and encourage all of our employees to collaborate and voice feedback about our product and ways we can improve as a business. We believe in never settling, and that also pertains to your growth.