Director / Vice President – SaaS Production Operations, SRE & Security

Director / Vice President – SaaS Production Operations, SRE & Security
Location: Chennai, India (relocation support available)
Experience: 15+ years
Leadership Scope: Production Operations, Cloud Infrastructure, SRE, DevSecOps, Security Engineering and ISMS
Role Overview
We are seeking a senior technology leader to own end-to-end production operations, reliability engineering, cloud infrastructure and security engineering for a business-critical, customer-facing SaaS platform.
This is a hands-on leadership role requiring proven experience running live SaaS production environments, managing 24×7 operations, meeting customer SLAs, leading major incidents and building proactive security engineering capabilities.
The successful candidate will lead an established Cloud Operations and Information Security Management System (ISMS) organization, strengthen its technical capabilities and drive measurable improvements in reliability, security, automation and operational efficiency.
We are looking for a proven production operations leader—not someone whose experience is limited to enterprise IT infrastructure, architecture, product development or compliance management.
Key Responsibilities
1. SaaS Production Operations & Reliability
Own end-to-end operational reliability, availability, performance and support for customer-facing SaaS platforms.
Lead 24×7 application monitoring, production support, on-call operations, escalation management and customer SLA adherence.
Establish and manage SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, observability and reliability improvement programs.
Personally lead critical production incidents, coordinate technical response, conduct root cause analysis (RCA) and drive preventive actions.
Improve incident frequency, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), change success rates and production stability.
Establish effective capacity planning, performance optimization, release safety and operational readiness practices.
2. Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Engineering
Own cloud architecture, provisioning, infrastructure operations and platform resilience.
Manage cloud environments across OCI, AWS, Azure or GCP, with OCI experience preferred.
Oversee Kubernetes, virtual machines, microservices infrastructure, cloud networking and databases.
Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC), policy as code, configuration automation and standardized provisioning.
Own disaster recovery, backup and restoration testing, business continuity and infrastructure cost optimization through FinOps.
3. Security Engineering & Proactive Risk Prevention
Lead hands-on security engineering across IAM, privileged access, secrets management, API authorization and multi-tenant isolation.
Establish continuous vulnerability identification, risk prioritization, remediation SLAs and security verification.
Drive cloud security posture management, security monitoring, threat detection and security incident response.
Own penetration-testing programs and ensure identified vulnerabilities are remediated within defined timelines.
Embed security controls into production operations and software delivery rather than relying solely on periodic audits.
4. DevSecOps & Secure Delivery
Partner with software Engineering to integrate automated security controls into CI/CD pipelines.
Implement SAST, DAST, SCA, secret scanning, container security and Infrastructure as Code scanning.
Establish security gates, remediation SLAs, exception management and measurable security engineering outcomes.
Enable secure and efficient releases without introducing unnecessary manual bottlenecks.
5. ISMS, Compliance & Customer Assurance
Lead operational implementation of ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and SOC 2 controls.
Ensure controls are continuously enforced and validated across production systems.
Manage customer security assessments, audit readiness, risk registers and corrective actions.
Build an integrated operating model where security engineering and compliance work together, with technical risk reduction as the priority.
6. Automation & AI-Driven Operations
Drive AIOps adoption for anomaly detection, event correlation, predictive monitoring and incident response automation.
Reduce manual operational effort through scripting, workflow automation and intelligent monitoring.
Establish production security controls for AI agents, including identity, tool authorization, execution isolation, audit trails and human approval for high-risk actions.
7. Organization Leadership & Transformation
Lead and develop the existing Cloud Operations, SRE and ISMS organization, including managers and senior technical leaders.
Establish clear ownership, operational KPIs, escalation structures and accountability across teams.
Identify capability gaps, recruit critical talent and develop a technically strong leadership pipeline.
Drive operational transformation through automation, engineering discipline, measurable service improvements and continuous learning.
Report production reliability, security exposure, major incidents, remediation progress and infrastructure efficiency to executive leadership.
Mandatory Requirements
15+ years of overall technology experience, with substantial experience in production operations, SRE, cloud infrastructure or security engineering leadership.
Proven leadership of a customer-facing SaaS product or platform in a live production environment.
Direct accountability for 24×7 application monitoring, customer SLAs, production reliability and major incident management.
Demonstrated experience personally leading critical production incidents and implementing corrective and preventive actions.
Strong technical leadership experience managing managers, senior engineers and multi-disciplinary teams.
Hands-on expertise in at least one major cloud platform: OCI, AWS, Azure or GCP.
Strong understanding of Kubernetes, microservices, networking, databases, infrastructure automation and disaster recovery.
Practical security engineering experience covering IAM, secrets management, API authorization, vulnerability management and security incident response.
Experience implementing DevSecOps controls and automated security testing within CI/CD pipelines.
Demonstrated success in improving an existing organization's processes, reliability, security posture and operational performance.
Preferred Experience
Multi-tenant SaaS products in insurance, fintech, financial services or other regulated industries.
OCI architecture and operations.
ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and SOC 2 control implementation in production environments.
AIOps implementation and AI-agent security in production.
Experience scaling engineering organizations and driving operational transformation.
First-Year Success Measures
First 90 days
Establish baseline reliability, incident, security and cloud cost metrics.
Identify operational and security risks, with clear owners and remediation timelines.
Deliver a prioritized 12-month transformation roadmap.
Within 12 months
Demonstrate measurable improvements in production incident frequency, MTTR, vulnerability exposure time and cloud cost efficiency.
Establish automated security gates and tenant-isolation testing.
Complete a successful disaster recovery test.
Strengthen operational ownership, incident prevention, security automation and team effectiveness.
Candidate Application Requirements
Please provide specific examples demonstrating:
A major production incident you personally led on a customer-facing SaaS platform, including business impact, your role and corrective actions.
A security engineering initiative or security incident you led, including tools used, vulnerabilities addressed and remediation timelines.
Your current leadership structure, including direct reports, managers reporting to you, total team size and budget responsibility.
Whether your production platform was a product sold to customers or a service delivered to a client.
Candidates should be prepared to discuss measurable outcomes and their personal accountability for production reliability and security.
Ideal candidate: A senior production operator who combines strong technical depth, executive leadership, customer-facing SaaS operations ownership, SRE, proactive security engineering and organizational transformation experience.

Work arrangement
No