Amal Nivin A

GenAI & Innovation Leadership (Strategic Projects):

• Project Chain Breaker (AI-Powered Recurring Incident Identification): Led the development of a GenAI system utilizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to match root causes, automating the creation of GameDay scenarios and providing real-time recurrence reporting to internal tools, transitioning incident management from reactive to predictive.
• Project Eagle Eye (GenAI Change Risk Assessment Platform): Developed a GenAI-driven platform that integrates with ITSM to predict incident probability from planned changes, establishing a proactive risk notification system that significantly reduced the change failure rate and improved overall service stability.
• Applied strong conceptual and practical knowledge of AI/ML concepts like RAG and model consumption.

Safety Engineering & Resilience Leadership:

• Proactively strengthened service resilience by working as part of the Safety Engineering team to plan and execute GameDays across different teams.
• GameDays involve strategic simulations to test system resilience, improve incident response, and proactively identify vulnerabilities.
• The process includes: developing realistic scenarios, simulating production environments, introducing controlled failures, measuring/analyzing results, and incorporating learnings to enhance system designs and incident response plans.

Automation & Process Optimization:

• Accrova: Automated Change Request creation for ServiceNow maintenance notifications using Serverless Paved Road.
• HCAP Bot: Developed a collaboration platform for streamlined change approval workflows using Serverless Paved Road.
• RCA Armor: Built a Slack reminder tool to ensure timely Root Cause Analysis (RCA) compliance for Jira tasks on IKS infrastructure.
• Managed the successful migration of internal services to Serverless Paved Road technology, followed by ownership transfer to ITSM engineering.

Cloud Operations & Service Ownership:

• Incident Management Leadership: Led P1/P2 incidents as the Incident Commander, ensuring quick resolution within SLA agreements.
• Managed daily operations support for AWS queries, VPC peering requests, and critical AWS account maintenance (ACP violations, CVE security vulnerabilities, access key rotation, patching).
• Served as the sole engineer in the IDC responsible for SNOW Mirror DB operations, proactively resolving issues before U.S. business hours and managing maintenance for SNOW Mirror Servers.

Awards & Recognition:

• Recognized for excellence and impact with the DevX Excellence Award (FY23 Q4) and Star of the Quarter award multiple times (FY21 Q3/Q4 and FY23 Q4).

Global Project Leadership & Deployment:

• Served as a deployment engineer, leading complex, global deployment projects with required travel to customer Data Centers across Asia and EMEA.
• Led Disaster Recovery (DR) implementation for the NMS application for the DU Dubai customer, requiring onsite travel and execution at customer data centers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
• Successfully managed DR setup and full system upgrades (NMS/EMS Applications, Database, Firmware, OS, VMware Products) for the Viettel Vietnam customer across multiple locations.

Downtime Minimization & Risk Management:

• Pioneered and executed Near Zero Downtime upgrade solutions for NMS, VMware vSphere components, and multiple Oracle Databases, reducing database and NMS downtime by 5 to 6 hours.
• Strategically designed and implemented comprehensive Disaster Recovery solutions for customers, ensuring business continuity and data integrity during critical disruptions and primary site maintenance.

Cloud & Virtualization Infrastructure Management:

• Directed the deployment of new NMS/EMS Applications onto Virtualization and Cloud Environments at customer data centers.
• Managed major infrastructure projects including scaling the Virtualization infrastructure, Storage Migration (EMC to EMC), and Data Migration from Bare metal to Cloud.
• Handled the installation and upgrading of critical VMware vSphere components (vCenter Server, VDP Appliances, and ESXi hosts).
• Oversaw the setting up of VMware infrastructure by configuring enterprise hardware, including EMC VNX 5400/5100, HP C7000 Chassis, Blades, Brocade SAN Switch, and HP VC-Flex.

Awards & Recognition:

• Received the "Spark of Infinite" Award for continued excellence and achievement in the NSW GSC NETACT BSS project (July '18 - Sept '18).
• Awarded the Certificate of Appreciation in recognition of significant contribution towards NOKIA Application & Analytics.

Process Improvement & Automation Strategy:

• Drove efficiency by researching and recommending innovative, automated approaches for system administration tasks to leverage resources and provide economies of scale.
• Maintained operational, configuration, and procedural documentation.

Critical Incident & Vendor Coordination Leadership:

• Led and managed "war room" activities for critical ESX hardware issues, coordinating complex resolution across application teams, datacenter engineers, and vendors (e.g., managing Vmotion and server shutdowns).
• Proactively analyzed and diagnosed root causes for complex VMware issues (PSOD, server reboots, storage disconnectivity) by analyzing vm-support logs and vCenter logs, coordinating closely with Hardware and Storage teams.
• Provided Tier II support, investigated and troubleshot issues, and coordinated communication with impacted constituencies during hardware/software failures.

System Administration & Infrastructure Oversight:

• Managed server lifecycle: installed, rebuilt, configured, and provisioned new servers in accordance with standards.
• Maintained security by installing and patching security updates on operational systems including Red Hat Linux, Windows 2003/2008, and VMWare, and performed regular security monitoring.
• Expertly managed and maintained enterprise-level, mission-critical VMware environments, including installation, configuration, and troubleshooting for ESX/ESXi, HA, DRS, VMotion, and vCenter. Performed ongoing performance tuning and resource optimization.

Project Leadership & Transition Management:

• Led and successfully completed the complex upgrade of two major transmission tools for the KPNG group, ensuring business continuity.
• Played a critical role in project handover, participating in the successful transition of the entire project from the company to Tech Mahindra.
• Spearheaded team readiness by training and mentoring team members on necessary support operations and best practices for managing project infrastructure.

Operations & Service Scope: Provided Level 2 support for the servers and OSS applications, managing a multi-vendor operator environment (Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei, TEIN, Aimos, etc.). Offered 24/7 on-call support on a rotational basis.

Technical Environment & Systems Oversight:

• Managed a broad suite of Operations Support Systems (OSS) including HP Openview Suite, OSSRC, ENIQ, SO-EM, TimePictra, Ericsson DXX, and Alcatel SDH.
• Supported Business Support Systems (BSS) like Multi-Activation (EMA) and Multi-Mediation (EMM/BGW).
• Oversaw Infrastructure & Storage systems (Sun, HP, Blade Systems, X86) running operating systems like Solaris, HPUX, Windows Server, and Suse Linux.
• Maintained Databases (Oracle 10G, Sybase 12.5, MySQL) and utilized backup/HA tools (NetBackup, Veritas Cluster Server).

Customer: Vodafone Hutchinson Australia

Key Responsibilities & Project Leadership:

• Provided 24/7 on-call support on a rotational basis to ensure 100% network availability for the Vodafone Australia customer.
• Ensured all multi-vendor servers (Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, Windows Server) and applications (Netcool, Huawei U2000, NetAct, etc.) were operational and available for end-users.
• Developed scripts to automate tasks, reducing manual work and improving operational efficiency.
• Utilized shell scripts for automated health checks, system clean-up, and automated SMS alerts to managers for missed alerts.

Key Achievements & Cross-Vendor Management:

• Critical Network Integration & Deployment Leadership: Served as the lead integration specialist, requiring a 35-day onsite deployment in Sydney to execute the Netcool integration, support, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) during the major RAN equipment swap from Ericsson to Huawei.
• Vendor & SLA Management: Coordinated cross-functionally and resolved issues with various Australian vendors (including Ericsson, Huawei, and Aimos) to successfully meet the project-specific Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Successful Transition Management: Led the successful transition of three complex Hutchinson tools from Ericsson Australia to the Nokia GNOC in Chennai, demonstrating proven capability in knowledge transfer and operational handover.