Lead DevOps Engineer

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,…