Lead Data Platform Engineer

Calix provides the cloud, software platforms, systems and services required for communications service providers to simplify their businesses, excite their subscribers and grow their value. 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)