Deputy General Manager - IT

Job description

**Job Summary:** The Deputy General Manager – IT is the operational backbone of the IT Infrastructure function, owning day-to-day delivery across Cloud Infrastructure, Enterprise Networking, and IT Operations & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). This is a techno-managerial role for a hands-on technology leader who can run a 24×7 mission-critical airline IT operations, hold technical authority over AWS/Azure architecture and network design, lead and mentor a multi-location team. It offers a genuine individual-contributor-to-people-leader growth path, with direct accountability for uptime, incident response, capacity planning and cost discipline. **Key Responsibilities:** *1. Managerial & Leadership* - Lead and develop a multi-disciplinary team spanning Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, DBA, SRE with direct people-management responsibility for team leads. - Work with the Sr. GM, IT in strategic reviews, budget forums, vendor negotiations and executive/board-level reporting as required. - Drive a culture of accountability, predictability and continuous improvement, embedding SOPs, RACI ownership and measurable SLAs across all operational teams. - Manage relationships with AWS, Azure, Sophos, telecom carriers, ISPs, MSPs and infrastructure vendors, including contract governance and performance reviews. - Partner cross-functionally with organizational departments and sub-departments within the IT function to align IT delivery with business priorities. - Own IT operations budgeting and cost governance, including cloud spend optimisation, run-rate forecasting and capex/opex planning. - Support ISO 27001 surveillance audits, GDPR/SOX-aligned controls, and broader IT governance, risk and compliance obligations. *2. Cloud Infrastructure (Emphasis Area)* - Own the end-to-end AWS cloud environment – architecture, capacity, cost and reliability – spanning EC2/ECS, RDS, CloudWatch, IAM, Secrets Manager, CloudTrail, VPC/NAT, DAX, ACM and related services. - Provide technical leadership on multi-region and disaster recovery architecture, including active DR provisioning (e.g. ap-south-2) and cross-region failover design. - Drive cloud cost management discipline – usage analysis, rightsizing, reserved capacity, unit economics (cost per aircraft/employee/airport) and an active cost-optimisation register. - Own cloud security posture in partnership with the security team - Evaluate and implement emerging cloud capabilities (e.g. AWS Bedrock/AI services) in support of the organisation's data and AI initiatives. *3. Enterprise Networking (Emphasis Area)* - Own the design, performance and resilience of the enterprise network – WAN/LAN, SD-WAN, MPLS, VPN and last-mile telecom links connecting corporate office, airports, aircraft operations bases and training centres. - Lead network security architecture in conjunction – segmentation, zero-trust principles, secure remote access and perimeter defence. - Own telecom vendor management – carrier SLAs, circuit provisioning, bandwidth planning and cost optimisation - Ensure network readiness and rapid turnaround for new airport and aircraft operations base launches, aligned to the organisation's expansion cadence. *4. IT Operations & Site Reliability Engineering (Emphasis Area)* - Establish and mature SRE practice – monitoring, alerting, incident management, on-call rotations, postmortems and error-budget-driven reliability targets – for all business-critical systems. - Own uptime and availability targets for mission-critical, day-of-ops systems, with defined RTO/RPO and tested failover procedures. - Own capacity planning and performance engineering across compute, storage, database and network layers to stay ahead of the organisation's fleet, airport and headcount growth. - Lead root-cause analysis and continuous improvement for major incidents, with formal post-incident review and preventive action tracking. - Support identity and access lifecycle initiatives, working closely with the security and applications teams. **Required Qualifications and Experience:** - Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, IT or a related field; a Master's degree (MBA/M.Tech) is an advantage. - 8–12 years of progressive IT experience, including at least 3–4 years directly supervising cloud, network and IT operations functions. - Prior experience in aviation, travel, logistics, BFSI or another 24×7 operations-critical, multi-location industry is strongly preferred. - Demonstrated experience managing IT for a distributed, high-availability environment with mission-critical uptime requirements. - Track record of leading teams of 10+ IT professionals across infrastructure, network and operations disciplines. - Experience operating in or supporting an ISO 27001 / audit-driven governance environment. **Technical Skills:** 1. **Cloud (AWS – Primary):** Architecture, cost optimisation, DR/multi-region design, IAM/security, EC2/ECS, RDS, CloudWatch, VPC/NAT, Secrets Manager, ACM, CloudTrail 2. **Cloud (Azure & M365 – Secondary):** Tenant administration, hybrid identity, M365 workload management, cost and license governance 3. **Networking:** Enterprise WAN/LAN, SD-WAN, MPLS, VPN, routing/switching, bandwidth and capacity planning, telecom carrier management 4. **Network Security:** Firewall administration (Sophos or equivalent), segmentation, zero-trust access, XDR/MDR-integrated network defence 5. **IT Operations:** 24×7 NOC/helpdesk operations, ITSM/ITIL processes, multi-site support models, SOP and self-service portal ownership. 6. **SRE Practice:** Observability/monitoring stacks, incident and on-call management, SLO/error-budget design, capacity and performance engineering. 7. **Database & Data:** Familiarity with RDS/managed database administration, backup/DR, performance tuning. 8. **Security & Compliance:** ISO 27001 controls, endpoint security, audit support, GDPR/SOX-aligned practices. 9. **Vendor & Cost Management:** Cloud/telecom