MALLESU YALLA

Experienced Staff Engineer DevSecOps with over 11 years in full-stack development, DevOps, and cloud architecture. Specialises in Terraform, Kubernetes, and secure CI/CD practices, driving compliance in healthcare and fintech. Leads architectural decisions and engineering standards while mentoring cross-functional teams. Certified CKA, AZ-400, and AZ-104.

• Igloo — Payment Gateway Platform - Fintech (Tech Lead), Built and led a PCI-DSS payment platform on AKS + Istio with zero-downtime blue/green delivery., Led platform engineering for a PCI-DSS payment gateway on AKS, running 40+ microservices across CDE, Non-CDE, and ODS clusters through an Istio service mesh., Delivered Istio-based blue/green deployments via a dedicated igloo-istio-routing GitHub Actions workflow — schema-validated, weight-based traffic switching (DestinationRule BLUE/GREEN subsets) with automated pre-switch pod validation, rollback, and blue-release cleanup for zero-downtime releases., Designed a single generic Helm chart consumed by all services via a 3-repo CI/CD model (app repo ? igloo-infra reusable workflows ? shared igloo-he1m chart), standardizing deployment across environments (DEV ? QA ? E2E ? DEMO ? PROD)., Built the Azure Platform Landing Zone: management-group hierarchy isolating the PCI CDE, hub-and-spoke multi-region topology (East US 2 primary, Central US DR), Azure Firewall deny-by-default egress with east-west filtering, and Private DNS resolver., Implemented defense-in-depth security and IAM: Istio mTLS with AuthorizationPolicy / RequestAuthentication, Entra ID + PIM time-boxed CDE elevation (MFA + approval), RBAC-to-groups, managed identities, Key Vault CSI secrets, NetworkPolicies, and Microsoft Defender for Containers/Key Vault., Guided the team on cluster architecture, autoscaling (HPA / Karpeneter), Terraform module reuse, and production troubleshooting.
• CI/CD Modernization — Azure DevOps ? GitHub Actions - Digital Platform (Tech Lead / Architect), Migrated the org from Azure DevOps to a reusable, supply-chain-secured GitHub Actions platform., Led the enterprise migration of CI/CD from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions, standardizing delivery on a central reusable-workflow repository (plat-reusable-yaml-workflows) with per-framework pipelines (Docker, .NET, React)., Established a build-once / deploy-many model — one immutable, versioned container image promoted by digest across Dev ? QA ? Stage (manual approval) ? Production., Delivered multi-region (East US + Central US) production deployments with health checks and slot swaps for zero-downtime releases., Hardened the software supply chain end-to-end: SAST (SonarCloud, Veracode, CodeQL), SCA / dependency-CVE scanning, secret scanning, Trivy image scanning (SARIF ? GitHub Security), Syft SBOM (SPDX), cosign keyless signing and attestation (OIDC / Fulcio / Rekor), and StackHawk DAST., Shifted security left into pull requests with GitHub Advanced Security, AI-assisted PR reviews, branch protection, required reviewers, and status-check gates — blocking merges on critical findings., Replaced Azure DevOps PATs with OIDC federated auth and GitHub Apps (JWT ? 1-hour installation tokens, private key in Key Vault via managed identity) — eliminating long-lived credentials and enforcing least-privilege repo scoping., Contributed to change-management improvements through CI/CD security checks, release approvals, segregation of duties, and traceable change records linking Jira, pipelines, and Confluence to support audit readiness.
• Digital AI Voice Agent — Real-time AI Scaling (Architect), Doubled real-time AI voice capacity with a multi-region active-active design on Azure AI Foundry., Architected multi-region active-active scaling for a Genesys-integrated voice agent on Azure AI Foundry — Voice Live (gpt-realtime) for member transportation scheduling., Removed the 30 NCPM single-region bottleneck by deploying across East + Central behind Cloudflare, adding application-level connection routing, retry/backoff, and NCPM pacing — raising effective capacity from 30 to 60 new connections/minute and eliminating the single point of failure., Handled the real-time audio pipeline (PCM16 ? PCM16 resampling, barge-in), Cosmos DB session state, and TPM throttling mitigation.

• Contributed to NationsBenefits being recognized as Best DevOps Platform Transformation Organisation at the 5th DevOps 2.0 ConExF & Awards 2026 — for the platform-engineering transformation delivered here.
• Owned end-to-end architecture — from design through production — for major, business-critical platform initiatives across payments, cloud migration, and AI.
• Led CI/CD modernization from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions — a reusable, platform-driven pipeline with signed, SBOM-attested images and multi-region zero-downtime deploys.
• Delivered Igloo, a PCI-scoped payment gateway on AKS running 40+ microservices behind an Istio mesh with mTLS, PCI CDE isolation, and zero-downtime blue/green releases.
• Architected multi-region active-active scaling for a real-time AI voice agent on Azure AI Foundry, doubling connection capacity and removing a single point of failure.
• Earned CKA; traveled onsite to the US (x2, B1) to lead major production releases.