Director, MTS (DevOps)

Gracenote, a Nielsen company, is dedicated to connecting audiences to the entertainment they love, powering a better media future for all people. We are the content data business unit of Nielsen that powers innovative entertainment experiences for the world’s leading media companies. Our entertainment metadata and connected IDs deliver advanced content navigation and discovery to connect consumers to the content they love and discover new ones Gracenote's Data Platform is the central hub for millions of pieces of TV entertainment data used daily by clients and partners worldwide. It provides the critical services that structure and model data for our editorial, ingest, and delivery systems. This data powers entertainment solutions for the top cable, OTT, CE, and digital clients, reaching hundreds of millions of consumers.

The Director of DevOps & Platform Engineering Gracenote India will be central to the success of our infrastructure, cloud platform, and engineering enablement teams across geographies. This role is fundamental to the growth and technical excellence of the Gracenote engineering organization as a whole. Key goals of this role are to establish technical rigor, operational efficiency, and a robust platform engineering culture. You will be responsible for managing compute infrastructure, cloud native and managed services, observability stacks, and cloud cost optimization (FinOps), while collaborating closely with local and global stakeholders to ensure high availability, scalability, and security for Gracenote's products.

Responsibilities

• Manage and scale multiple teams of DevOps, and Cloud Infrastructure engineers in India, with direct and indirect managerial responsibilities.

• Work with local and global management across all relevant organizational partners to ensure the success, productivity, and operational alignment of assigned teams.

• Create a culture based on Nielsen values, fostering collaboration, continuous learning, and engineering excellence across platform operations.

• Establish operating rhythm and cadence within areas of responsibility to ensure transparent communication, inclusive leadership, and a positive, high-retention environment for engineers.

• Track and drive key performance indicators (KPIs) including system availability/SLA performance, incident resolution times, infrastructure productivity, cloud spend efficiency, and employee retention.

• Oversee and manage Gracenote’s AWS footprint, including large-scale compute resources and AWS-managed services such as AWS Glue, Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka), EKS, EMR, RDS, and S3.

• Drive Kubernetes platform operations (Amazon EKS), focusing on automated scaling, cluster management, workload security, and operational reliability.

• Own and evolve the in-house observability stack based on Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, and related telemetry tools to ensure end-to-end visibility across microservices and data pipelines.

• Lead FinOps and cloud cost management initiatives, establishing robust cost tracking, forecasting, efficiency benchmarks, and continuous resource optimization strategies without compromising performance.

• Apply an automation-first mindset to Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and self-healing systems.

• Coordinate and maintain a strong talent pipeline.

• Continuously assess, streamline, and improve DevOps processes, incident management workflows, and infrastructure reliability standards.

• Ensure strict adherence to toolings, governance, and security best practices within the Product Development Lifecycle.

• Represent the India DevOps and Platform Engineering organization in cross-functional engagements (e.g., Product, Software Engineering, Architecture, and Data Science).

• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering.

• 12+ years of experience working in DevOps, Cloud Infrastructure.

• Proven track record in people management, team building, and leading multi-disciplinary DevOps teams in a global environment.

• 8-10 years of hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD tools, Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation), and scripting (Python, Shell, Go, etc.).

• 5+ years of dedicated experience managing production AWS environments at scale, specifically focusing on Amazon EKS and AWS native managed services (AWS Glue, MSK, EMR, S3, RDS, DynamoDB).

• Deep expertise in open-source and custom observability tools, particularly Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or ELK stack.

• Proven track record in FinOps—managing cloud budgets, identifying cost inefficiencies, implementing auto-scaling/spot instances, and tracking cloud spend metrics.

• Strong foundation in Kubernetes architecture, containerization, microservices deployment, and networking/security policies.

• Good understanding of enterprise workflow and business tools such as JIRA, Confluence, OpsGenie, Gitlab, and CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI).

• Strong critical thinking, incident response leadership, and analytical problem-solving skills.

• Sense of curiosity, operational discipline, and high attention to detail.

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