Job Summary :

The Deputy General Manager - IT is the operational backbone of the IT Infrastructure function, owning day-to-day delivery across Cloud Infrastructure, Enterprise Networking, and IT Operations & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

This is a techno-managerial role for a hands-on technology leader who can run a 24x7 mission-critical airline IT operations, hold technical authority over AWS/Azure architecture and network design, lead and mentor a multi-location team.

It offers a genuine individual contributor - to - people - leader growth path, with direct accountability for uptime, incident response, capacity planning and cost discipline.

Key Responsibilities :

1. Managerial & Leadership :

- Lead and develop a multi-disciplinary team spanning Infrastructure, Cloud, Networking, DBA, SRE with direct people-management responsibility for team leads.

- Work with the Sr. GM, IT in strategic reviews, budget forums, vendor negotiations and executive/board-level reporting as required.

- Drive a culture of accountability, predictability and continuous improvement, embedding SOPs, RACI ownership and measurable SLAs across all operational teams.

- Manage relationships with AWS, Azure, Sophos, telecom carriers, ISPs, MSPs and infrastructure vendors, including contract governance and performance reviews.

- Partner cross-functionally with organizational departments and subdepartments within the IT function to align IT delivery with business priorities.

- Own IT operations budgeting and cost governance, including cloud spend optimisation, run-rate forecasting and capex/opex planning.

- Support ISO 27001 surveillance audits, GDPR/SOX-aligned controls, and broader IT governance, risk and compliance obligations.

2. Cloud Infrastructure :

- Own the end-to-end AWS cloud environment - architecture, capacity, cost and reliability - spanning EC2/ECS, RDS, CloudWatch, IAM, Secrets Manager, CloudTrail, VPC/NAT, DAX, ACM and related services.

- Provide technical leadership on multi-region and disaster recovery architecture, including active DR provisioning and cross-region failover design.

- Drive cloud cost management discipline - usage analysis, rightsizing, reserved capacity, unit economics and an active cost-optimisation register.

- Own cloud security posture in partnership with the security team.

- Evaluate and implement emerging cloud capabilities in support of the organisation's data and AI initiatives.

3. Enterprise Networking :

- Own the design, performance and resilience of the enterprise network - WAN/LAN, SD-WAN, MPLS, VPN and last-mile telecom links connecting corporate office, airports, aircraft operations bases and training centres.

- Lead network security architecture in conjunction - segmentation, zero-trust principles, secure remote access and perimeter defence.

- Own telecom vendor management - carrier SLAs, circuit provisioning, bandwidth planning and cost optimisation.

- Ensure network readiness and rapid turnaround for new airport and aircraft operations base launches, aligned to the organisation's expansion cadence.

4. IT Operations & Site Reliability Engineering :

- Establish and mature SRE practice - monitoring, alerting, incident management, on-call rotations, postmortems and error-budget driven reliability targets - for all business-critical systems.

- Own uptime and availability targets for mission-critical, day-of-ops systems, with defined RTO/RPO and tested failover procedures.

- Own capacity planning and performance engineering across compute, storage, database and network layers to stay ahead of the organisation's fleet, airport and headcount growth.

- Lead root-cause analysis and continuous improvement for major incidents, with formal post-incident review and preventive action tracking.

- Support identity and access lifecycle initiatives, working closely with the security and applications teams.

Desired Qualifications/Certifications :

Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, IT or a related field; a Master's degree (MBA/M.Tech) is an advantage.

Preferred Work Experience :

- 8 - 12 years of progressive IT experience, including at least 3 - 4 years directly supervising cloud, network and IT operations functions.

- Prior experience in aviation, travel, logistics, BFSI or another 24x7 operations-critical, multi-location industry is strongly preferred.

- Demonstrated experience managing IT for a distributed, high availability environment with mission-critical uptime requirements.

- Track record of leading teams of 10+ IT professionals across infrastructure, network and operations disciplines.

- Experience operating in or supporting an ISO 27001 / audit-driven governance environment.

Skills and Knowledge :

Technical Skills :

- Cloud (AWS - Primary) & Cloud (Azure & M365 - Secondary)

- Networking & Network Security

- SRE Practice

- IT Operations

- Database & Data

- Security & Compliance

- Vendor & Cost Management

Managerial Skills :

- People leadership

- Operational rigour

- Executive communication

- Cross-functional influence

- Budget ownership

- Change and crisis management

- Vendor and contract negotiation