Director Head of Infrastructure Engineering & Reliability

Senior Vice President

Location: Pune, India

Reporting to: Global Head of Infrastructure Technology

About Infrastructure Technology

The Global Infrastructure organization builds and maintains the critical technology backbone that enables Jefferies to operate at scale, delivering secure, resilient and high-performing IT services that power the business. We drive innovation through solutions such as cloud and hybrid adoption, network resiliency, platform modernization and automation. The organization is structured into several specialized sub-domains: Core Infrastructure Platforms, Cloud Solutions & Platforms, Digital Workplace, Networking, Telecom & Multimedia, International Infrastructure and Infrastructure Engineering & Reliability. Our teams collaborate globally to ensure Jefferies' technology platforms are highly available, secure, scalable and cost-effective.

About the Role

Jefferies is seeking a Senior Vice President to build and lead the global Infrastructure Engineering & Reliability (I E&R) function, a peer Infrastructure Technology pillar with teams in New York, London, Hong Kong and Pune.

I E&R leads production delivery, infrastructure reliability, operational execution and continuous improvement across the firm’s infrastructure platforms. The function brings together deployment, lifecycle management, 24x7 operations, automation, observability and incident management to improve service quality, reduce manual effort and lower operational risk. I E&R is an engineering function, not an operations team: it runs the firm’s infrastructure and is expected to automate the manual effort out of it, measured by the reduction in manual work year over year.

This is a hands-on technology leadership role, not a traditional operations management position. The successful candidate will lead globally distributed engineering teams that operate critical infrastructure platforms while advancing automation, standardization, observability and reliability across the environment.

What You’ll Do Lead a Global Infrastructure Engineering & Reliability Organization

• Build and lead the global Infrastructure Engineering & Reliability function from Pune, absorbing operational scope domain by domain on an agreed sequence, establishing the standard, the baseline of manual effort and the automation backlog for each domain before taking on the next.
• Establish one global operating model, infrastructure incident response standard, on-call standard and service-quality measure across the infrastructure estate.
• Lead specialist reliability engineering teams aligned to infrastructure domains, supported by shared automation, observability and shift functions.
• Develop high-performing engineering teams focused on reliability, automation and operational excellence.

Own Global Infrastructure Operations

• Own 24x7 operations and follow-the-sun coverage for the global infrastructure estate.
• Execute incidents, patching, platform hygiene, certificate and lifecycle work, capacity events and operational requests against engineering-domain standards.
• Maintain clear operating boundaries with the service desk, global command center, service delivery functions and on-site teams where physical presence is required.
• Share architectural decision-making with the other global Infrastructure leads: jointly shape domain strategy, roadmaps, target state and design decisions, while Architecture leads design and standards and I E&R leads production delivery and reliability.

Improve Reliability Through Engineering

• Set the expectation that every engineer in I E&R both operates and automates: the engineers who handle day-to-day operations write the automation that removes the manual work.
• Baseline manual operational effort across the estate and maintain a ranked automation backlog focused on reducing complexity, improving resilience and eliminating repetitive work.
• Protect a defined share of engineering capacity for automation from the first month, and flag any period when incident demand consumes that capacity.
• Use operational data, incident trends, problem records and service-performance metrics to prioritize engineering improvements.
• Shift the function from recovery to prevention by retiring recurring failure classes and reducing reactive effort year over year.

Drive Service Reliability and Incident Management

• Own Infrastructure’s response to major incidents globally as the single accountable counterpart to the enterprise command center: the infrastructure on-call and escalation standard, technical leadership on the bridge, and Infrastructure’s communications into the firm incident process. Technical root cause resolution for design issues remains with the owning engineering domain.
• Provide the infrastructure incident lead in-region during local market hours under one global standard and a single follow-the-sun handover.
• Own Infrastructure’s remediation from post-incident reviews through to permanent fix and automation-backlog updates.

Strengthen Observability, Capacity and Operational Intelligence

• Jointly shape observability strategy with Architecture leads and own production instrumentation, alerting, operational tooling, capacity forecasting and performance engineering for services under production support.
• Improve visibility into platform health, service performance, capacity, operational risk and service-readiness gaps, giving engineering and operational teams actionable insights for faster detection, diagnosis and recovery.
• Build automation, runbook tooling, self-service capability and operational instrumentation that global engineering teams can adopt.

Set Production Readiness and Capacity Commitments

• Where recurring manual effort traces to an unresolved design flaw, return operational responsibility to the owning engineering domain with supporting evidence rather than absorbing the work indefinitely.
• Participate from the inception of new technology and own acceptance into production support, validating operational readiness and requiring runbooks, monitoring and alerting before a service is taken on.
• Take capacity requests from engineering domains on an agreed cycle and commit named people and dates against a published allocation.
• Decline capacity the function does not have, and resolve competing demand through the standing operations governance review.
• Keep previously agreed allocations in force when competing demands cannot be resolved before the next planning cycle.

Manage Talent, Risk and Regulatory Requirements

• Own hiring, development, performance management and retention for the I E&R function.
• Partner with the other global Infrastructure leads to set the technical bar for roles in their areas, share architectural and roadmap decisions, and include them in hiring and promotion readiness decisions.
• Ensure patching, vulnerability remediation, compliance evidence and audit readiness meet security, regulatory and control requirements.
• Publish commitments against delivery, with service-quality and efficiency claims validated outside the function before they are used elsewhere.

Qualifications and Skills Experience

• 15+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering and operations, including 5+ years leading a global operations, run or site reliability function. Financial services or comparable large-scale enterprise IT experience preferred.
• Recent hands-on experience in at least three of these areas: Unix and Linux, Windows server engineering and operations, virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix), storage (SAN and NAS), backup and disaster recovery, database platforms (SQL Server, Oracle or similar), networking, or public cloud services.
• Experience owning major incident command in a regulated, market-facing environment, including executive communications during a live event and accountability for post-incident remediation.
• Proven automation delivery in a live operational estate, with working fluency in at least one scripting or programming language, modern automation and configuration tooling, and a record of writing automation directly.
• Experience running follow-the-sun or multi-region shift coverage, including on-call standards, handover and cross-time-zone escalation.
• Track record of measuring and reducing manual operational effort, with evidence of the baseline, method and resulting reduction.
• Experience consolidating operational scope from separate teams into a single operating standard, including the organizational change that comes with it.
• Evidence of turning an operations team into an engineering team, including raising the technical bar, retiring manual processes, and retaining engineers who would otherwise pursue build roles.

Core Competencies

• Deep technical expertise, able to lead troubleshooting, ask the right questions, interpret technical indicators and command resolution during platform issues and outages.
• Domain credibility with engineers and global Infrastructure leads, with the judgment to contribute meaningfully to shared architecture, roadmap and target-state decisions while executing against agreed domain standards.
• Comfort exercising the judgment to decline capacity or an unready service, while balancing shared architectural decisions with clear accountability for production delivery and reliability.
• Strong foundation in regulatory, compliance and operational risk management for infrastructure.
• Executive presence, able to earn trust in both technical and business forums and to partner with CIO leadership, business unit leads and regional engineering leaders.
• Outstanding stakeholder management, communication, prioritization and conflict resolution skills, with the ability to settle competing demands directly with peer domain leads rather than escalating them.
• Experience designing and enforcing incident, problem and on-call standards, service levels, production readiness criteria and operational governance.

Certifications (optional, but valued)

• Recognized certifications in platform, cloud or service management disciplines (RHCE, MCSE, VMware, Nutanix, NetApp, AWS/Azure/GCP, ITIL and similar), and credentials in reliability engineering or automation tooling.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent required; Master's degree preferred.

What Success Looks Like

Success means the firm has a reliable operating baseline, fewer recurring issues, stronger automation adoption, consistent global standards and measurable reductions in manual effort.

I E&R provides disciplined execution, transparent capacity commitments and permanent remediation.

At full maturity, Pune is recognized as a global infrastructure engineering and reliability location, not a support site, and the function is measured by the work it eliminates, the services it stabilizes and the operating risk it reduces.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Jefferies values diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.