Ajit Hegde
Bengaluru
Summary
Seasoned Infrastructure Platform Engineer with 10 years of experience in architecting and optimizing cloud-native solutions for high-growth environments. Expertise spans large-scale Kubernetes deployments, microservices migration, advanced observability implementation, and cost-optimization strategies. Proven track record in designing robust CI/CD pipelines, implementing security protocols, and leading DevOps and SRE initiatives. Demonstrated ability to drive technical innovation, enhance operational efficiency, and align infrastructure solutions with business objectives, consistently delivering value in fast-paced, technology-driven organizations.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
Work History
DevOps Engineer - IV
Groww
07.2023 - Current
- Spearheaded the implementation of an enterprise-grade observability platform leveraging open-source tools, contributing to several high-profile projects including Prometheus and ArgoCD.
- Led the migration from Thanos to Grafana Mimir for long-term metrics storage, resulting in a 60% improvement in query performance.
- Drove user adoption through the creation of interactive dashboards, delivery of technical presentations, and publication of thought leadership content, increasing Monthly Active Users (MAU) from 100 to 400 within two quarters. Successfully catered to diverse stakeholders including developers, architects, NOC teams, and executive leadership.
- Achieved and maintained exceptional uptime for the observability infrastructure, ensuring continuous monitoring and insights for critical systems.
- Optimized infrastructure costs by 50% through strategic migration to a single-zone architecture while maintaining a 99.5% Service Level Agreement (SLA).
- Streamlined operational processes by evaluating and decommissioning non-essential tasks, including on-call rotations and ad-hoc requests, resulting in improved team efficiency and output quality.
- Pioneered the development of a sophisticated alerting system, including the creation of novel metrics to measure alerting effectiveness, significantly enhancing incident response and system reliability.
- Mentored 2 SDE3s and 3 SDE2s.
DevOps Engineer - III
Groww
07.2021 - 07.2023
- Strategically restructured the Infrastructure team into specialized sub-teams, each with distinct objectives and key performance indicators, enhancing overall operational efficiency and accountability.
- Spearheaded the adoption of Terraform as the primary Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, successfully migrating 70% of the infrastructure to this platform, thereby improving consistency, scalability, and version control.
- Implemented comprehensive Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Objectives (SLOs) for all critical services, visualizing these metrics through Grafana dashboards to drive data-informed decision-making and performance optimization.
- Led the enterprise-wide rollout of Loki as a scalable logging solution, significantly enhancing log management capabilities across all teams.
- Collaborated with the Business Finance team to develop a sophisticated cost visibility framework utilizing GCP BigQuery and Looker Studio, enabling accurate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculations for each business unit and identifying key areas for optimization.
- Engineered an innovative cost visualization solution within GCP, which was subsequently documented and shared with the GCP team. This solution was recognized for its effectiveness and implemented by other GCP customers, showcasing our team's thought leadership in cloud cost management.
- Pioneered the integration of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices within the stocks and infrastructure teams, fostering a culture of reliability, automation, and continuous improvement.
DevOps Engineer - II
Groww
07.2020 - 07.2021
- Orchestrated a strategic restructuring of the infrastructure team, creating smaller, specialized units to enhance operational efficiency and agility.
- Played a key role in recruiting a director-level executive, facilitating a transition that allowed for more focused technical leadership by delegating stakeholder and personnel management responsibilities.
- Leveraged lessons learned from Kubernetes migration to establish new, robust scaling standards, incorporating best practices for managing expanded infrastructure and processes.
- Implemented centralized Helm charts, facilitating seamless team migrations and establishing version control via Nexus, thereby enhancing deployment consistency and efficiency.
- Developed and deployed 'Heimdall', an in-house solution designed to detect, report, and remove unauthorized or improperly labeled resources, effectively preventing platform misuse and enhancing security posture.
- Engineered a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, incorporating critical safeguards such as market-time deployment blocks, canary releases, test coverage requirements, and security analysis, significantly improving deployment reliability and reducing risk.
- Executed the migration of WAF, CDN, and DNS services from Akamai to Cloudflare, resulting in a dramatic reduction in First Time to Byte (FTTB) from an average of 600ms to under 100ms, enhancing overall application performance.
- Implemented automation solutions using StackStorm to streamline routine operational tasks, including disk space management and system restarts, thereby reducing manual intervention and improving system reliability.
DevOps Engineer - I
Groww
09.2019 - 06.2020
- Contributed to the growth of Groww, a financial technology platform facilitating investments in mutual funds, stocks, and other financial instruments.
- Executed a large-scale migration of 30+ microservices from virtual machines to Kubernetes, significantly enhancing scalability and operational efficiency.
- Implemented and maintained critical messaging systems including Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Redis. Standardized deployment processes through Ansible, improving consistency and reducing manual intervention.
- Orchestrated the transition from GCP-managed WAF to Akamai as the primary Web Application Firewall, Content Delivery Network, and DNS provider, enhancing security and performance.
- Evaluated and implemented various logging solutions optimized for Kubernetes environments. Deployed Rsyslog as a developer-friendly logging tool, improving troubleshooting capabilities and system observability.
- Led complex networking initiatives, including:
- Establishing site-to-site VPN connections for vendor integrations
- Implementing VPN solutions for office laptops
- Creating interconnections between AWS and GCP environments
- Designing scalable CIDR allocation strategies
- Configuring Shared VPC architectures - Played a pivotal role in facilitating a company-wide transition to remote work. Dedicated a quarter to ensuring robust connectivity, enhanced security measures, and optimal performance for all employees in a distributed work environment.
Senior DevOps Engineer
Wizely
10.2018 - 09.2019
- Crated a highly secure cloud environments and successfully mitigated many DDos, SSH attacks
- Started PCI/DSS certification.
DevOps Engineer
Wizely
10.2017 - 09.2018
- Wizely is a financial application which helps people in achieving the habit of savings by giving rewards
- Negotiated with AWS to get maximum discounts and keep the cloud bill at bay.
Software Engineer
Tech Mahindra Ltd
11.2015 - 10.2017
Associate Software Engineer
Tech Mahindra Ltd
12.2014 - 11.2015
Education
Bachelor of Engineering (BE) - Computer science and technology
Basaweshwar Engineering College Bagalkot
Bagalkot06.2014
Skills
- Public Cloud - GCP, AWS
- IaC - Terraform, Crossplane
- WAF,CDN - Cloudflare, Akamai
- Observability - Grafana LGTM stack, Honeycomb, Newrelic
- Cost optimization
- Istio
- EBPF
- Python
- Argo
- Networking - VPN, Tunnels, NAT, Shared VPC
- Golang, Python, Shell
- Leadership Skills
Hobbies and Interests
I like reading books of all genre. I read/listen at least 2-3 hours a day. I love superhero movies (DC fan) and like thriller genre.
Timeline
DevOps Engineer - IV
Groww
07.2023 - Current
DevOps Engineer - III
Groww
07.2021 - 07.2023
DevOps Engineer - II
Groww
07.2020 - 07.2021
DevOps Engineer - I
Groww
09.2019 - 06.2020
Senior DevOps Engineer
Wizely
10.2018 - 09.2019
DevOps Engineer
Wizely
10.2017 - 09.2018
Software Engineer
Tech Mahindra Ltd
11.2015 - 10.2017
Associate Software Engineer
Tech Mahindra Ltd
12.2014 - 11.2015
Bachelor of Engineering (BE) - Computer science and technology
Basaweshwar Engineering College Bagalkot
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