Lead CI/CD Engineer, Salt Lake Sector V — Kolkata
A full-time, on-site Lead CI/CD Engineer role is open at a company based in Salt Lake Sector V, Kolkata. This sits at the senior end of the DevOps ladder, built for someone who's already owning a pipeline somewhere, not learning what one is. The company is asking for 11 years of relevant experience, and that number sets the bar for how much they expect this person to already know walking in.
Pipelines here run dozens of deployments a week across several development and production environments, and when one of them breaks, it tends to break for everyone downstream at once. Last quarter, a bad GitLab CI cache configuration quietly started shipping stale build artifacts for nearly two days before anyone caught it, since the deployment logs looked clean the whole time. Preventing that kind of slow, quiet failure, not just the loud crashes, is a real part of what this role is responsible for.
The work itself covers:
- Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines across the company's development and production environments
- Automating infrastructure provisioning so new environments don't require manual setup
- Troubleshooting pipeline and deployment failures wherever they surface, from build scripts to the servers they deploy to
- Reviewing pipeline changes proposed by other engineers before they merge into shared configuration
Required skills include hands-on work with CI/CD tools, particularly Jenkins or GitLab CI, along with strong scripting ability, solid version control practices, and a track record of automating manual processes rather than just tolerating them. Applicants should be able to describe a pipeline they built from scratch, including a specific failure they worked through, rather than only listing tools they've touched. A few additional skills would help, though they aren't mandatory: experience with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, and some background working across more than one cloud provider.
On the education side, a bachelor's degree is the furthest the company draws a hard line. No specific major is mandated, though most people in similar roles came from an engineering or computing background, simply because that's where this kind of hands-on systems experience tends to develop naturally. At this level, the eleven years of applied DevOps work behind the degree matters more than the degree itself.
Compensation for this role runs up to ₹148,000 a month, on-site, full-time, reflecting the seniority and scope expected of the position. Benefits attached to the role include:
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Performance-linked bonuses tied to deployment reliability and delivery targets
- On-site cafeteria access and cab or commute support
Salt Lake Sector V has become one of Kolkata's busiest tech corridors over the past decade, packed with a mix of IT services companies and product teams working out of the same handful of office parks. Naukri Mitra sees a fair number of CI/CD engineer roles come out of this specific stretch of the city, and this posting sits toward the top of that range given the seniority attached to it.
The role reports directly to the head of engineering and has real decision-making authority over pipeline architecture, rather than sitting in a purely advisory capacity. Other engineers bring proposed pipeline changes to this person before anything gets merged into shared configuration, so mentoring newer team members becomes a regular part of the week alongside the hands-on automation work.
On-call responsibility comes with the territory here, roughly one week out of every five, and a broken pipeline during that window jumps ahead of whatever else was planned for the day. Most weeks pass without anything urgent coming up, but the expectation is built into the role's seniority rather than treated as an occasional favor asked of whoever's available.
Interviews typically move through a technical round focused on real pipeline and infrastructure scenarios, followed by a conversation with the head of engineering about past incidents the candidate has handled. Someone who can walk through a deployment failure they actually diagnosed and fixed, start to finish, tends to come across better in that conversation than someone reciting tool names from a resume.
Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and given how specific the experience requirement is, the hiring timeline for this one tends to move faster than it does for junior roles. Candidates based outside Kolkata should raise that early in the process, since it shapes how the conversation around compensation and logistics is structured.
Most of the deployment tooling here runs on GitLab CI, with Jenkins still handling a couple of older services that haven't been migrated yet. Part of the job involves deciding when it's worth moving one of those legacy pipelines over versus leaving it alone, since a working system that nobody has to touch often isn't worth the migration risk just for consistency. That judgment call comes up more often than most people expect when you walk into a lead-level role.
Version control discipline matters as much as the pipeline tooling itself. A branching strategy that made sense with five engineers starts causing merge conflicts and deployment collisions once a team grows past fifteen, and this company is somewhere in the middle of that transition. Part of this role's mandate is to tighten branching and release practices without slowing the team so much that people start working around the process instead of through it.
There's no formal management track attached to this position, but the lead engineer here does have real influence over how the broader DevOps function is structured as the company scales. A few engineers who've held similar lead roles elsewhere have gone on to head up entire platform teams within two or three years, which gives a sense of where this kind of experience can lead without guaranteeing a fixed outcome for anyone specific.
Kolkata's tech scene around Sector V has grown steadily, and salaries for senior DevOps roles here have climbed closer to what similar positions pay in bigger hubs, though the cost of living remains noticeably lower. That gap helps explain why more experienced engineers from other cities are looking at roles like this one instead of relocating to a more expensive city for a comparable salary.
