A company based in MIDC Ambad, Nashik, is hiring a Lead Ansible Automation Engineer for a full-time, on-site role paying up to ₹1,48,000 a month. The role requires 11 years of hands-on automation experience and includes real ownership of how infrastructure is provisioned and maintained across the environments this team runs. The position opened after the previous lead moved into a platform architecture role, leaving behind an automation setup that's functional but hasn't had a dedicated owner in a few months.
What you'll be doing
The day-to-day centers on Ansible, but the scope goes beyond writing playbooks all day. You'll decide how configuration management gets structured across teams, then make sure the rest of the engineering group follows that structure once it's in place.
- Design and maintain Ansible playbooks and roles for provisioning, configuration, and deployment across multiple environments
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that tie automated infrastructure changes to code releases
- Troubleshoot issues that span development and production, often ones that surfaced after a deployment already went out
- Set standards for how the rest of the DevOps team writes and reviews automation code
- Work directly with Linux systems at a level deep enough to diagnose problems Ansible alone won't surface
A fair share of the job also involves cleanup. Most teams at this stage have automation that grew organically and needs consolidating: duplicate roles nobody's quite sure are still in use, and playbooks written before naming conventions existed. Part of the lead's job is deciding what to keep, what to rewrite, and what to delete outright. One recent case involved three near-identical playbooks for provisioning database servers, each written by a different engineer over the past two years, none of them aware the others existed until a deployment collision forced the issue into the open. Sorting through that kind of overlap is routine here, not a one-off cleanup project.
Education, certification, and experience
A bachelor's degree is the baseline, usually earned in a computing-adjacent program, though nobody on this team has ever asked a candidate to produce their transcript. Alongside the degree, the role requires a recognized cloud certification; AWS, Azure, or GCP all count. Eleven years of hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and automated deployment work is expected, with most of it spent running systems rather than studying them in a certification course.
Containerization experience matters here too, since much of what gets automated eventually runs inside containers rather than directly on a host. A candidate who's only worked with Ansible against bare-metal or VM targets will have some catching up to do. That catching up is manageable within the first month or two, provided the underlying Ansible and Linux fundamentals are already solid.
Skills that matter
- Ansible, including playbook design, role structuring, and inventory management at scale
- Configuration management principles beyond just one tool
- Scripting, Python or Bash both come up regularly
- Linux administration, comfortable enough to work outside a GUI entirely
Beyond that core set, a few things will strengthen an application without being required outright: working knowledge of Terraform alongside Ansible, experience with Kubernetes or Docker in production, and exposure to monitoring tools like Prometheus or Grafana to track what automated changes actually did to system performance. None of these are dealbreakers if missing, but a lead who's touched all of them will ramp up faster on this particular stack. Certification in one of the major cloud platforms is required, as noted earlier, though which specific one matters less than being able to translate that knowledge to whichever provider this team actually runs on.
Leading the team
This role reports to the head of infrastructure and sits above two mid-level engineers who currently split automation work without much coordination between them. Fixing that lack of coordination is arguably the real reason this seat exists. Expect regular one-on-ones with both engineers, code review responsibility for anything that touches shared infrastructure, and enough autonomy to restructure the team's workflow if the current approach isn't working. One of the two engineers already on the team joined through Naukri Mitra about a year ago, and the hiring manager has mentioned wanting someone who can mentor him toward eventually owning a piece of the automation stack independently.
Weeks vary more than most people expect. Some stretches are heavy on writing and reviewing code; others go almost entirely to firefighting after a deployment surfaces an issue nobody caught in testing. Both are part of the job, not an exception. On-call rotation isn't formalized yet for this team, but as the incoming lead, expect to be the first call when something automated breaks outside business hours until that changes.
Compensation and benefits
- Salary up to ₹1,48,000 per month
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Performance-linked bonuses tied to infrastructure reliability metrics
- Relocation assistance and accommodation support for candidates relocating to Nashik
Anyone comparing Ansible automation engineer salary in Nashik per month against roles in bigger cities will find this one competitive once you factor in accommodation support and the lower local cost of living. Bonus payouts here are tied to measurable reliability numbers- uptime and rollback frequency chief among them- rather than a subjective year-end review.
Applying
This is an on-site position in MIDC Ambad, so relocation or a daily commute is part of the deal. Send a resume that details specific automation projects you've led, including rough scale, number of hosts or environments managed, and what tools sat alongside Ansible in that stack. Candidates further along in their search for Ansible automation engineer jobs for experienced professionals in Nashik should know the process here runs in two stages: a technical discussion around a past automation project, followed by a conversation with the two engineers who'd be reporting to you. Both usually happen within the same week, and a decision typically follows within a few days of the second conversation. Bring specific numbers to the technical round if you can: host counts, deployment frequency, incident rates, since vague descriptions of scale tend to slow the conversation down rather than move it forward.
