Hiring Junior DevOps Engineer in Pune

SKO Systems India Pvt. Ltd. is a growing technology solutions provider headquartered in Pune, Maharashtra, specializing in cloud-native application development, infrastructure automation, and AI-enabled operations for clients across BFSI, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors. With a team of 150+ engineers and a strong focus on continuous learning, we are expanding our DevOps practice to support multi-cloud deployments and MLOps pipelines for enterprise customers.

We are hiring a Junior DevOps Engineer to join our Cloud Operations team in Pune. This role is designed for early-career professionals (0–2 years of experience) who want to build hands-on expertise in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD automation, container orchestration, and emerging MLOps workflows. You will work alongside senior DevOps engineers and platform architects on real production systems, not just sandbox environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Provision and manage AWS and Azure cloud resources using Terraform and CloudFormation, maintaining infrastructure-as-code repositories with version-controlled modules for VPC, IAM, EKS/AKS clusters, and managed databases.
• Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and Azure DevOps for microservices written in Java, Python, and Go, achieving deployment frequency of multiple releases per day with automated rollback on health-check failures.
• Administer and optimize Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS) including Helm chart management, namespace isolation, resource quotas, network policies, and integration with external secrets operators and cert-manager for TLS automation.
• Implement observability stacks using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry; define SLIs/SLOs for latency, error rate, and throughput; configure alerting routes with escalation policies in PagerDuty and Slack.
• Automate Linux server hardening, patch management, and configuration drift detection using Ansible playbooks and Bash/Python scripts across 200+ EC2/VM instances in staging and production environments.
• Collaborate with data science teams to operationalize ML models: build training pipelines with Kubeflow or MLflow, containerize inference services, and deploy model-serving endpoints with A/B testing and canary rollout strategies.
• Manage container registries (ECR, ACR, Harbor), enforce image scanning policies with Trivy/Snyk, and implement signed image verification using Cosign and Sigstore in admission controllers.
• Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation (one week per month) with runbook-driven incident response; conduct blameless postmortems and contribute to runbook improvements after each SEV-1/SEV-2 event.
• Contribute to internal developer platform initiatives: build self-service templates for service scaffolding, environment provisioning, and database migration workflows using Backstage or custom portal.
• Document architecture decisions, runbooks, and onboarding guides in Confluence; present demo sessions during bi-weekly DevOps guild meetings.

Work Environment & Culture

Our Pune office (Baner) operates on a hybrid model — three days on-site for collaboration, design reviews, and pair programming; two days remote. The DevOps team follows a "you build it, you run it" philosophy with shared ownership across development and operations. We invest 10% of sprint capacity in tech debt reduction, tooling upgrades, and learning spikes. Quarterly hackathons encourage experimentation with emerging tools like Crossplane, ArgoCD, or WasmEdge.

Candidate Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.
• 0–2 years of professional experience in DevOps, SRE, cloud engineering, or related roles; strong internship or project portfolio accepted for freshers.
• Solid Linux fundamentals: process management, file systems, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP), shell scripting (Bash), and systemd service management.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python preferred) for automation tasks and tooling development.
• Hands-on experience with Git workflows (branching strategies, rebasing, cherry-picking, merge conflict resolution).
• Foundational knowledge of container concepts: Dockerfile optimization, multi-stage builds, image layering, and runtime security.
• Exposure to any major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) — certifications (AWS Cloud Practitioner, AZ-900) are a plus but not mandatory.
• Basic understanding of CI/CD concepts: build agents, artifact repositories, pipeline stages, and deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling).
• Willingness to learn infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), configuration management (Ansible), and Kubernetes internals.
• Strong problem-solving mindset, ability to read stack traces, correlate logs/metrics/traces, and communicate findings clearly.

Technical Stack

Cloud: AWS (EC2, VPC, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, EKS), Azure (VM, VNet, AKS, Key Vault, DevOps)

IaC: Terraform (modules, workspaces, remote state), CloudFormation

CI/CD: Jenkins (declarative pipelines, shared libraries), GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps Pipelines

Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS, AKS), Helm, Kustomize, ArgoCD (learning)

Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, PagerDuty

Scripting/Automation: Python, Bash, Ansible, Git

MLOps: MLflow, Kubeflow (introductory), model registry, feature store concepts

Security: Trivy, Snyk, Cosign, Vault (secrets management)

Benefits & Compensation Context

• Annual CTC: ₹4–7 LPA (fixed + variable), aligned with market benchmarks for junior DevOps roles in Pune; includes performance bonus (up to 10%) and annual increment cycle (10–15% based on impact).
• Health insurance: ₹5L family floater (employee + spouse + up to 2 children) with parental top-up option.
• Learning budget: ₹25,000/year for certifications, courses, conferences, or books; paid study leave for cloud certifications (AWS Solutions Architect Associate, CKA, Azure DevOps Expert).
• Equipment: MacBook Pro 14" (M3) or Dell XPS 15 + external monitor; home office stipend ₹15,000 one-time.
• Leave: 24 days annual leave + 10 public holidays + 5 sick days + 1 volunteering day; unlimited work-from-home for personal exigencies (manager approval).
• Referral bonus: ₹25,000 for successful DevOps hires; quarterly team outings and annual offsite.

Career Growth Opportunities

• Structured 12-month progression framework: Junior DevOps Engineer → DevOps Engineer (L2) → Senior DevOps Engineer (L3) with defined competency matrices for cloud, automation, Kubernetes, and observability.
• Mentorship program: paired with a senior engineer for bi-weekly 1:1s, code reviews, and architecture shadowing.
• Internal mobility: pathways to Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Architecture, or MLOps specialization after 18–24 months.
• Technical leadership track: opportunity to lead internal tooling projects, contribute to open-source (company-sponsored), and speak at meetups (Pune DevOps Community, CloudNative Pune).

Hiring Process

• Application screening (within 3 business days) — we review GitHub/GitLab profiles, project portfolios, and resume for hands-on evidence.
• Technical phone screen (45 min) — Linux fundamentals, scripting, cloud basics, and a live debugging exercise via shared terminal.
• Practical assignment (take-home, 3–4 hours) — build a minimal CI/CD pipeline deploying a containerized app to a Kubernetes cluster using Terraform and GitHub Actions; evaluated on automation, security, and documentation.
• On-site/virtual panel (2 hours) — system design discussion (scalable web architecture), incident simulation walkthrough, and culture fit conversation with team lead and engineering manager.
• Offer rollout within 5 business days of final round; joining date flexible within 30 days.

If you have built something that runs in production — even a side project — and want to accelerate your DevOps career in a team that ships daily and learns constantly, we want to hear from you.