Babitha Palani
Principal Infra Engineer
Summary
Principal Infrastructure Engineer building highly available platforms that improve stability, release quality, and production resilience. Leads Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD automation for 5+ processes per year, and Chef-based configuration management to standardize enterprise environments and reduce operational risk. Partner with application, infrastructure, and release teams on disaster recovery planning, observability and monitoring, maintaining 2+ plans and supporting change control and root cause analysis for 5+ major incidents per month.
Overview
11
11
years of professional experience
Work History
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Cognizant
10.2024 - Current
- Maintain cloud based and vm based production services daily with strong uptime and fast incident response across infrastructure environments.
- Implement highly available infrastructure to improve operational stability and performance across enterprise systems.
- Standardize enterprise environments through CI/CD tools and Infrastructure as Code methods to improve consistency and delivery speed.
- Authored Chef cookbooks to automate configuration management and reduce manual setup effort.
- Coordinate with cross-functional teams on secure, compliant infrastructure frameworks, disaster recovery planning, and release readiness.
- Perform root cause analysis on platform issues and drive continuous improvement to strengthen reliability, release quality, and productivity.
Site Reliability Engineer
Comcast
11.2021 - 06.2024
- Resolved 5 priority incidents per week while coordinating service restoration across 24x7 production environments.
- Maintained reliability, availability, and performance for mission-critical applications in 24x7 production environments.
- Collaborated with application and infrastructure teams to implement resilient, high-availability solutions aligned with SRE best practices.
- Conducted root cause analysis for critical incidents and implemented preventive actions to improve platform stability.
- Supported change and release activities to maintain production readiness and reduce operational risk during deployments.
- Drove service improvements through infrastructure automation and observability and monitoring enhancements.
Lead DevOps Engineer
HCL Technologies
07.2019 - 10.2021
- Monitored 10 CI pipeline runs daily to catch build failures before release windows.
- Managed CI/CD pipelines to support efficient software delivery across build and deployment stages.
- Oversaw build and release processes, keeping deployments aligned with scheduled windows and release governance.
- Created and deployed application patches and hotfixes to limit production impact from issues.
- Trained developers on version control practices, including code check-ins, branching, merging, and delivery workflows.
- Developed technical documentation, process guides, and wiki articles to standardize build and release procedures.
Automation Specialist
Amazon
08.2017 - 10.2019
- Reduced incident resolution time by SLA% through faster log analysis and troubleshooting across Linux-based automation workflows.
- Maintained uptime 99% for backend processing components by supporting deployment checks and routine stability validation.
- Built backend components for data processing, storage, and retrieval using MySQL to support application functionality.
- Optimized SQL queries and database operations in MySQL to improve application performance and data access.
- Automated file management and log analysis with Linux commands and shell utilities to support application stability.
- Managed Git-based source control using version control best practices to support clean code integration and collaboration.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to design, test, and deploy enhancements and bug fixes with improved application reliability.
Software Engineer
Virtusa
05.2015 - 08.2017
- Maintained 15 CI jobs per sprint to support automated builds and deployment workflows across application teams.
- Onboarded applications to CI platforms and configured automated build pipelines for more consistent delivery.
- Managed build failures and release activities while coordinating with developers to keep delivery moving.
- Collaborated with development teams to integrate applications into CI pipelines and reinforce DevOps practices.
- Created technical documentation for CI onboarding, build processes, and internal automation frameworks.
- Delivered demonstrations and presentations on internal tools while identifying automation opportunities that reduced manual effort.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
SRR Engineering College
05-2015
XIIth - English
CSI Ewarts
Chennai, INDIA04-2011
Xth - English
ST.Antony's Anglo Indian School
Chennai, INDIA05-2009
Skills
CI/CD
Version control
Infrastructure automation
Disaster recovery planning
Incident postmortems
Blue-green deployments
Observability and monitoring
Release governance
Incident coordination
Change control
Root cause analysis
Cross-functional alignment
Jenkins
Bitbucket/Git/GitHub
Jfrog
Cloud foundry
VMware
AWS EC2
Splunk/Dynatrace
Prometheus/Grafana
Terraform
HarshiCorp Vault
XLR Automation
Chef-based deployment/patching
Accomplishments
- Improved system uptime to ~99.9%+ through proactive monitoring, incident response, and infrastructure optimization.
- Reduced Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) by ~40–50% by automating troubleshooting workflows and enhancing incident response processes.
- Increased deployment frequency by ~2–3x through CI/CD pipeline optimization and automation improvements.
- Achieved ~35–45% reduction in manual operational effort by automating build, deployment, and patch management activities.
- Improved build success rate to ~97–99% by enhancing pipeline stability and resolving recurring build failures.
- Reduced incident resolution time by ~30–40% through improved log analysis, monitoring, and alerting mechanisms.
Timeline
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Cognizant
10.2024 - Current
Site Reliability Engineer
Comcast
11.2021 - 06.2024
Lead DevOps Engineer
HCL Technologies
07.2019 - 10.2021
Automation Specialist
Amazon
08.2017 - 10.2019
Software Engineer
Virtusa
05.2015 - 08.2017
Xth - English
ST.Antony's Anglo Indian School
XIIth - English
CSI Ewarts
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
SRR Engineering College