Technical Lead Email Perimeter Security
Job Summary We are seeking a senior-level Lead Engineer/Technical Lead to join the Perimeter Email Security Engineering team. This role is responsible for engineering, automation, reliability, and security hardening of the firm s global email perimeter infrastructure. As a lead you will work with stakeholders to gather the req and define technical solutions, integrate legacy technologies with modern ones and legacy-to-modern platform transitions.
The engineer will play a critical role in modernizing legacy messaging environments into scalable, automated, and resilient platforms using Infrastructure-as-Code, AIOps and SRE principles. The position requires deep Linux expertise, strong automation capability, and hands-on experience managing large-scale SMTP/email security platforms in mission-critical environments. Core Responsibilities This is not just an engineering role we re seeking a leader who can:
The engineer will play a critical role in modernizing legacy messaging environments into scalable, automated, and resilient platforms using Infrastructure-as-Code, AIOps and SRE principles. The position requires deep Linux expertise, strong automation capability, and hands-on experience managing large-scale SMTP/email security platforms in mission-critical environments. Core Responsibilities This is not just an engineering role we re seeking a leader who can:
- Work directly with stakeholders to gather requirements
- Define end-to-end technical solutions
- Integrate legacy email gateway infrastructure with modern automation and observability frameworks
- Apply SRE and AI Ops concepts to improve reliability and reduce MTTR
- Engineer and modernize next-generation secure, highly available, and mission-critical email perimeter infrastructure.
- Provide architectural assurance and governance for messaging and email security initiatives across environments.
- Implement security controls and hardened configurations to manage operational and cyber risk exposure.
- Partner with IT Security and Risk teams to ensure compliance with enterprise security standards and regulatory expectations.
- Develop automated metrics reporting, observability dashboards, and health monitoring frameworks for SMTP infrastructure.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents and drive systemic remediation.
- Create, review, maintain, and publish technical documentation, automation runbooks, and knowledge base articles.
- Support large-scale SMTP gateway operations including traffic management, authentication enforcement, queue monitoring, and TLS configuration management.
- Work with a globally distributed engineering team to analyze, design, and implement automation solutions to eliminate operational toil and reduce manual intervention.
- Transform legacy systems into: Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Configuration as Code, Monitoring as Code using standardized enterprise automation frameworks.
- Design and implement anomaly detection, alerting strategies, and fault isolation mechanisms to improve platform reliability and reduce MTTR.
- Use AIOps for Data Aggregation, Anomaly Detection, Root Cause Analysis, Automation, Predictive Analytics for Faster Incident Resolution, Lower Operational Costs, Improved Observability and Proactive Management
- Hands-on experience managing DNS records supporting mail flow.
- Practical implementation of:
- SPF record design
- DKIM signing and key rotation
- DMARC policy enforcement (none/quarantine/reject)
- Experience troubleshooting authentication alignment failures.
- Understanding large-scale SMTP relay and gateway architectures.
- Strong understanding of Linux networking stacks and TCP/IP fundamentals.
- Deep knowledge of SMTP protocol internals and mail flow lifecycle.
- Experience managing spam filtering engines and policy tuning.
- Knowledge of email hygiene, content filtering, and threat detection.
- Familiarity with enterprise email security products (e.g., Proofpoint, Fortinet).
- Understanding of secure email gateway architecture and threat mitigation controls.
- Hands-on troubleshooting of DNS resolution, LDAP integration, and SSL/TLS handshake issues.
- Familiarity with NTP, SNMP, and enterprise network architectures.
- 5+ years scripting in Python and/or Bash.
- Ability to build automation frameworks and tooling.
- Experience writing maintainable, modular scripts for operational automation.
- Comfortable debugging production scripts and improving reliability.
- Minimum 3+ years building production-grade automation using Ansible.
- Ability to design reusable roles, playbooks, and modular automation.
- Proven experience implementing DevOps best practices.
- Experience embedding automation into build and deployment pipelines.
- Strong understanding of SRE concepts including: SLIs, SLOs, Error budgets, Observability design
- Familiarity with Agile principles
- Experience working within structured SDLC environments.
- Strong Git-based version control practices.
- Experience integrating automation and configuration management into CI/CD pipelines.
- Familiarity with Jenkins or equivalent CI tools.
- Strong ownership mindset in production-critical environments.
- Ability to operate independently with minimal supervision.
- Effective communicator across global teams.
- Strong documentation and design articulation capability.
- Mentorship ability for junior engineers.
- Proactive, self-driven learner with analytical problem-solving skills.
- Bachelor's degree in information technology, MIS, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of RHEL/Linux system administration in enterprise environments.
- Deep SMTP and email authentication expertise (DMARC, DKIM, SPF)
- 5+ years Hands-on experience in automation (Ansible, Python) and AIOps
- Experience leading architecture discussions and cross-functional teams
- Good to have hands on experience on AIOps such as natural language processing and machine learning models to automate, streamline and optimize IT service management and operational workflows.
- Experience developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining software and automation pipelines using SDLC management systems such as Git, Jira, ALM, and Jenkins.
- Experience operating and engineering large-scale SMTP email gateway environments with high availability requirements.
- SME in enterprise email security platforms such as Proofpoint, Cisco ESGA and/or Fortinet.
- Proficiency in networking, DNS architecture, LDAP integration, and SSL/TLS encryption standards.
- Prior experience in regulated industries, or other mission-critical 24x7 production environments preferred.
- Proven experience leading engineering teams, driving architectural decisions, and mentoring junior engineers in mission-critical environments.
