Sr Manager Client Technology

About the Role We are hiring a Manager, Cloud Platform Engineers to lead our India-based platform and automation engineering staff. This is a people-management role with real technical ownership -- you will be evaluated as much on your ability to review and stand behind your team's Kubernetes and Terraform work as on how you manage the people producing it. You will oversee day-to-day execution of AKS operations and Terraform-based automation, working in close coordination with the US-based Principal and Expert Platform Engineers who set the platform's architectural direction. This role exists to provide direct, hands-on management and accurate technical oversight of the India-based team -- including work planning, prioritization, quality review, and status reporting to the Senior Manager, Cloud Platform. Reporting must reflect verified, actual system state; this is a core expectation of the role, not a formality. What You'll Do • Directly manage India-based Cloud Platform engineers, including workload assignment, prioritization, and day-to-day people management. • Review and stand behind your team's Terraform module submissions and AKS configuration changes for correctness, adherence to documented standards, and production-readiness before they are considered complete. • Enforce engineering process standards across the team: issue-based work tracking, triage and prioritization before work begins, work-in-progress limits, and daily status updates. • Provide the Senior Manager, Cloud Platform with accurate, verified status reporting on the India-based team's work -- cross-checked against actual system and repository state, not summarized from memory or secondhand updates. • Coordinate with the Principal and Expert Platform Engineers on platform architecture and standards, ensuring the India-based team's work aligns with the broader platform's GitOps, Terraform, and AKS conventions. • Escalate technical or delivery risks early and directly, rather than allowing status to be discovered after the fact. • Support hiring, onboarding, and skill development for the India-based team, including closing gaps in Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD fundamentals where needed. • Apply policy-as-code and security standards already established on the platform (Kyverno or equivalent) when reviewing team output. Required Qualifications • 5+ years in platform, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering roles, including some prior people-management or formal technical-lead experience. • Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes, ideally AKS specifically -- sufficient to personally review a team member's cluster or workload change and identify problems. • Working Terraform experience, including the ability to review a submitted module for correctness, reusability, and adherence to documented standards. • GitOps experience (ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent) -- all infrastructure and cluster changes should trace to a git commit as a matter of practice, not preference. • Demonstrated ability to produce accurate, verifiable status reporting to senior leadership. • Experience managing engineers directly, including performance management, prioritization, and workload planning. • Working fluency in policy-as-code tooling (Kyverno, OPA/Gatekeeper, or equivalent). Preferred Qualifications • Experience managing a distributed or offshore engineering team reporting to a manager in a different region. • Practical, current experience using AI-assisted development tools in daily engineering work. • Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, or equivalent). • Background modernizing legacy automation (PowerShell or similar) toward Terraform or platform-native replacements.