Sr Engineering Manager - Kubernetes Operator

Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical use cases and workloads, including machine learning, generative, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases.

Global leaders, including Adobe, Airtel, Barclays, Criteo, DBS Bank, Experian, Grab, HDFC Bank, PayPal, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Trade Desk, and Wayfair, rely on Aerospike for customer 360, fraud detection, real-time bidding, profile stores, recommendation engines, and other use cases.

Job Summary

We’re looking for an experienced Senior Engineering Manager to lead the development of Aerospike’s platform management and automation systems — the layer that enables customers to deploy, operate, and observe Aerospike clusters seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments.

You will manage a talented group of engineers building our Kubernetes Operator and observability frameworks that provide deployment automation, lifecycle management, monitoring, and performance visibility for Aerospike’s distributed database platform.

This role combines strategic direction, people leadership, and hands-on technical depth. You’ll partner with Product, SRE, and Core Database teams — as well as business stakeholders across global locations — to drive alignment, set measurable goals, and ensure predictable delivery against company OKRs.

This is a hybrid role.Employees are expected to work from the Bangalore office 2-3 times a week.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow multiple engineering streams responsible for cluster lifecycle automation, monitoring, and management tooling.

• Own end-to-end architecture and delivery of Aerospike’s Kubernetes Operator and related orchestration frameworks.

• Define technical roadmaps, success metrics, and best practices for reliability, scalability, and security.

• Drive engineering excellence through design reviews, code quality standards, and continuous improvement.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product Management, SRE, and Cloud teams to deliver a consistent operational experience.

• Stay hands-on with architecture and code when needed — guiding technical problem-solving and unblockers.

• Champion observability, automation, and resilience as core principles in every release.

Required skills & experience

• Must have 10+ years of total experience, including 3 + years in engineering management or technical leadership roles.

• Proven success leading teams that build Kubernetes Operators, controllers, or related platform automation tools (mandatory).

• Strong programming and design skills in Golang (preferred) or Java/Python.

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals and lifecycle management of stateful workloads.

• Practical exposure to observability stacks — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or similar.

• Experience designing or operating distributed systems and large-scale backend platforms.

• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible).

Required leadership skills :

• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and team-mentoring abilities.

• Hands-on experience driving engineering OKRs, tracking deliverables, and reporting progress to business stakeholders and leadership.

• Proven ability to collaborate with international teams and cross-functional stakeholders (Product, SRE, Cloud, and Executive teams) to ensure alignment and successful execution.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with distributed NoSQL databases (Aerospike, Cassandra, Redis, MongoDB).

• Prior exposure to SRE or DevOps environments with a focus on reliability and performance.

• Understanding of performance profiling, system telemetry, or developer-platform design.