Deputy General Manager - IT

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 24×7 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 & LeadershipLead 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 sub-departments 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 (Emphasis Area)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 (e.g. ap-south-2) and cross-region failover design.Drive cloud cost management discipline – usage analysis, rightsizing, reserved capacity, unit economics (cost per aircraft/employee/airport) and an active cost-optimisation register.Own cloud security posture in partnership with the security teamEvaluate and implement emerging cloud capabilities (e.g. AWS Bedrock/AI services) in support of the organisation's data and AI initiatives.3. Enterprise Networking (Emphasis Area)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 optimisationEnsure 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 (Emphasis Area)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.Required Qualifications and Experience:Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, IT or a related field; a Master's degree (MBA/M.Tech) is an advantage.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 24×7 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.Technical Skills:Cloud (AWS – Primary): Architecture, cost optimisation, DR/multi-region design, IAM/security, EC2/ECS, RDS, CloudWatch, VPC/NAT, Secrets Manager, ACM, CloudTrailCloud (Azure & M365 – Secondary): Tenant administration, hybrid identity, M365 workload management, cost and license governanceNetworking: Enterprise WAN/LAN, SD-WAN, MPLS, VPN, routing/switching, bandwidth and capacity planning, telecom carrier managementNetwork Security: Firewall administration (Sophos or equivalent), segmentation, zero-trust access, XDR/MDR-integrated network defenceIT Operations: 24×7 NOC/helpdesk operations, ITSM/ITIL processes, multi-site support models, SOP and self-service portal ownership.SRE Practice: Observability/monitoring stacks, incident and on-call management, SLO/error-budget design, capacity and performance engineering.Database & Data: Familiarity with RDS/managed database administration, backup/DR, performance tuning.Security & Compliance: ISO 27001 controls, endpoint security, audit support, GDPR/SOX-aligned practices.Vendor & Cost Management: Cloud/telecom vendor contracts, run-rate forecasting, unit economics, SaaS portfolio governance.People leadership – building, mentoring and retaining a technical team across multiple locations and disciplines.Operational rigour – running a predictable, SLA-driven operation rather than a reactive, firefighting one.Executive communication – translating technical risk and status into board- and CFO-ready narrativesCross-functional influence – partnering effectively with intra-organizational departments.Budget ownership – managing IT operating and capital budgets with demonstrable cost discipline.Change and crisis management – leading through major incidents, audits and rapid organisational growthVendor and contract negotiation – securing favourable commercial and SLA terms from cloud, telecom and security vendors.