Cloud and Data Platform Operations Lead

Position Overview We are seeking an experienced operations leader to head the Cloud and Data Platform Operations function out of Chubb’s engineering centre in India. This is an Operations Leadership role — the successful candidate will own the 24/7 availability, reliability, and performance of Chubb’s enterprise cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) and data platforms hosted on these hyperscalers. This role leads a globally distributed, follow-the-sun operations team spanning APAC, EMEA, and the Americas, ensuring continuous 24/7 coverage with no gaps across time zones. You will be the senior escalation point for critical production incidents in US hour, driving rapid resolution and systematic prevention. Alongside operational accountability, you will champion engineering discipline within the team driving automation, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), DevSecOps practices, and data platform optimization to reduce toil, improve resilience, and support safe, frequent delivery.

Key Responsibilities
1. 24/7 Operations & Service Reliability
• Own end-to-end production operations for cloud infrastructure and data platforms, ensuring systems meet availability, performance, and SLA commitments around the clock.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for critical incidents — leading response, coordination, and communication across technical teams and executive stakeholders, regardless of time zone.
• Establish and maintain on-call rotas, escalation procedures, and runbooks across the globally distributed team to ensure no single point of failure in operational coverage.
• Drive post-incident reviews (PIRs) and root cause analysis (RCA), translating findings into preventative engineering improvements and updated operational playbooks.
• Define and track operational KPIs such MTTR, MTTD, change failure rate, system availability and report these clearly and regularly to senior leadership. 2. Follow-the-Sun Team Leadership
• Lead, manage, and develop a high-performing, globally distributed operations team across multiple time zones (APAC, EMEA, Americas), ensuring seamless handoffs and continuous 24/7 operational coverage.
• Build and enforce structured shift handover processes so that context, active incidents, and work-in-progress are reliably transferred between regional teams without information loss.
• Foster a strong operational culture: disciplined on-call practice, blameless post-mortems, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement of operational standards.
• Mentor team members across regions, balancing local autonomy with consistent global standards and escalation paths.
• Partner across cross-functional engineering, security, and business groups to align operational delivery with executive timelines and organizational priorities. 3. Incident, Problem & Change Management (ITSM)
• Own the full ITIL/ITSM lifecycle using ServiceNow: Incident, Problem, Change, and Request Management for all cloud and data platform services.
• Lead Major Incident Management for P1/P2 disruptions — coordinating response bridges, managing stakeholder communications, and driving resolution with urgency and clarity.
• Drive the Problem Management process: identify recurring incidents, prioritize root cause elimination, and track remediation to closure.
• Govern the Change Management process, ensuring all production changes are reviewed, risk-assessed, and scheduled to minimize operational disruption. 4. Multi-Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Engineering
• Design, build, and operate secure, highly available, and scalable cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP — with a focus on operational manageability and resilience.
• Deliver automated, reusable platform components and self-service templates (modular IaC via Terraform/Bicep) to reduce manual operational toil and improve consistency.
• Implement robust CI/CD pipelines with embedded security and quality gates (DevSecOps), supporting safe and frequent production deployments.
• Coordinate vendor relationships, manage cloud costs under a FinOps framework, and ensure platform components meet operational standards before production deployment. 5. Data Platform Operations & Spend Optimization
• Operate and maintain scalable data pipelines, ETL/ELT processes, and data models supporting underwriting algorithms and analytics workloads — with a focus on production reliability and data quality.
• Manage and optimize Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Databricks, and Azure Synapse Analytics environments: cluster sizing, job scheduling, performance tuning, and cost governance.
• Enforce data lifecycle policies, monitor consumption, and maintain strict production readiness standards for Lakehouse and data warehouse platforms.
• Ensure data quality, integrity, and compliance controls are embedded into operational processes, not treated as afterthoughts. 6. Stakeholder Management & Operational Reporting
• Translate operational performance such as availability metrics, incident trends, cost data, platform health into clear, actionable insights for non-technical executives and corporate underwriting leadership.
• Manage stakeholder expectations proactively: communicate planned maintenance, emerging risks, and incident impact with transparency and appropriate urgency.
• Act as the operational voice in delivery planning, ensuring engineering teams understand production constraints, operational readiness requirements, and go-live criteria before releases. Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree in IT, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, with 15–20 years of relevant experience.
• Proven experience leading 24/7 production operations and globally distributed teams.
• Strong knowledge of ITIL, ITSM, and ServiceNow across incident, problem, change, request, and major incident management.
• Deep expertise in AWS, Azure, GCP, cloud infrastructure, automation, CI/CD, Terraform, and enterprise data platforms.
• Experience applying FinOps, security, privacy, compliance, and data lifecycle controls.
• Strong executive communication skills, preferably gained in a regulated industry.