Lead Data Platform Engineer

The Cloud Platform Engineering team at Calix is responsible for building and operating the foundational platforms, tools, and CI/CD pipelines that enable product engineering teams to innovate and scale efficiently.

We are seeking a Lead Data Platform Engineer who brings strong experience in managing and evolving platform engineering teams, driving outcomes under pressure, and delivering reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient infrastructure platforms. This role requires a blend of hands-on technical expertise, leadership, and excellence in execution.

You will play a key role in shaping the platform strategy, mentoring engineers, and ensuring timely delivery of high-quality solutions that power Calix products.

Key Responsibilities:

Platform Engineering & Delivery

• Lead the design, re-architecture, and evolution of infrastructure platforms to ensure high availability, scalability, reliability, and security.

• Own end-to-end delivery of platform initiatives, ensuring timelines, quality, and operational excellence—even under high-pressure scenarios.

• Drive execution rigor, proactively identifying risks, bottlenecks, and dependencies, and ensuring timely mitigation.

Data & Infrastructure Platforms

• Design, implement, and optimize BigQuery datasets, tables, and queries for large-scale analytics workloads.

• Monitor and improve DB performance, including query optimization and cost control.

• Manage and scale data ingestion pipelines using tools such as Dataflow, Kafka, or Pub/Sub.

• Ensure strong data security and compliance standards, including IAM policies and data encryption.

Automation & Reliability

• Implement and enforce Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices using Terraform/Terragrunt.

• Build intelligent automation to predict capacity saturation, detect failures, and take preventive actions.

• Integrate observability into all platforms, ensuring deep visibility into system health, utilization, and cost.

Platform Operations & Governance

• Manage schema changes using automated tools such as Liquibase or similar.

• Define and enforce best practices for platform usage, cost efficiency, and reliability.

• Continuously improve platform stability, performance, and developer experience.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.

• Partner with cross-functional teams to understand requirements, drive alignment, and ensure adoption of platform capabilities.

• Communicate effectively with stakeholders, providing clear updates, setting expectations, and influencing decisions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building & leading large-scale distributed systems in highly available production environments.

• 5+ years of experience building and operating cloud-based infrastructure platforms and CI/CD pipelines (GCP preferred).

• Proven experience leading or significantly contributing to platform teams, with the ability to drive results in fast-paced and high-pressure environments.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence team performance.

• Hands-on expertise with GCP services, especially BigQuery; knowledge of AlloyDB and Cloud Spanner is a plus.

• Experience with data pipeline technologies such as Dataflow, Kafka, or Pub/Sub, and Kubernetes ecosystems.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

• GCP certification is a plus.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Location: Bangalore, India (Flexible Hybrid work model – 20 days in office per quarter)