Santosh DR
Bangalore
Summary
Strategic Principal DevOps Engineer with 11+ years of experience spanning Cloud-Native Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, and Deep-System Debugging. At Krutrim (Ola), spearheaded the transition from manual workflows to a high-governance GitOps ecosystem, managing Kubernetes clusters (QA,Stage and Production. Expert in Internal Developer Portals (Backstage), Database Reliability (Patroni/PostgreSQL), and Security Orchestration (Kyverno/Vault). Promoted to Principal Engineer for delivering a 90% reduction in cluster provisioning time and building automated "Secure-by-Default" scaffolding.
Overview
13
13
years of professional experience
Work History
Principal DevOps Engineer
Krutrim (Ola)
02.2026 - Current
- Infrastructure Architecture: Led the design and deployment of a secure on-premise cloud platform using RKE2 Kubernetes, integrating advanced monitoring and security solutions.
- Deployment Governance: Engineered an E2E automated pipeline (Jira → GitHub → ArgoCD), achieving 100% traceability from ticket to Production with PMO/ QA approval gates.
- Executive Technical Leadership: Serving as the final escalation point for mission-critical infrastructure, overseeing security compliance and platform scalability for 15+ production clusters.
- DevSecOps: Drove adoption including automated image scanning, audit logging, and secure Vault-based secrets injection.
Senior DevOps Engineer (SDE-3)
Krutrim (Ola)
08.2024 - 02.2026
- Internal Developer Portal (IDP): Architected the Krutrim Developer Tool based on Backstage, centralizing K8s monitoring, TechDocs, and API management into a single developer interface.
- Modernization & Velocity: Slashed On-Prem K8s cluster bring-up time from 3 days to 6 hours through automated provisioning and Helm-based workload migration.
- Reliability Engineering: Upgraded legacy Bitnami Postgres to Patroni for high availability; implemented robust backup/ notification logic to secure data across all environments. Handled K8S upgrade from 1.28 to 1.33.
- Security Orchestration: Hardened infrastructure using Kyverno for signed images and HashiCorp Vault for secrets; integrated Google Auth for identity-aware RBAC.
System Debug Software Engineer
Intel
01.2018 - 08.2024
- IoT Platform Integration: Standardized the E2E DevOps lifecycle for distributed IoT systems, implementing automated deployment gates that eliminated manual hand-offs and reduced time-to-market.
- Software Tooling & Analytics: Developed a Python-driven diagnostics suite for system-level stability; enabled automated "Sanity-as-a-Code" to provide deep-dive telemetry and performance validation during the CI/CD process.
- System Integrity: Managed the setup and debugging of HARTS environments from scratch; resolved complex setup issues during the SIT (System Integration Test) phase.
- Deep-Systems Analysis: Conducted memory-level stack analysis and crash report diagnostics to resolve mainline software degradations and functional stability issues.
Senior Software Engineer
Aricent Technologies
01.2013 - 01.2018
- Protocol Analysis: Specialized in LTE/ UMTS stack analysis (CSFB, SRVCC, Handover) and throughput measurements.
Graduate Research Intern
National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL)
- Engineered a real-time aerial surveillance system using dual-camera cylindrical mapping, optimizing CV algorithms for edge execution on low-power BeagleBoard hardware.
- Conducted rigorous performance benchmarking and full-stack system integration for flight-ready Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs).
Education
Master of Technology - Signal Processing
REVA Institute of Engineering And Technology
Bangalore06-2013
Skills
Platform Engineering: Backstage IDP, Software Templates, TechDocs, RBAC, OIDC/ Google Auth
Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (RKE2, K8s),Helm
CI/CD & GitOps: Kubernetes (On-prem/ Cloud), ArgoCD, Kyverno (Image Signing), Jenkins
SRE & Database Reliability: Patroni (Postgres HA), MongoDB, Cross-cluster Backup/ Recovery
Security & Secrets: HashiCorp Vault, Automated SAST/ Security Scanning, Jira Governance
Programming & Scripting : Python , Bash, Selenium, System Debugging (RCA)
Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana
Personal Information
- Date of Birth: 09/15/89
- Gender: Male
- Marital Status: Married
Timeline
Principal DevOps Engineer
Krutrim (Ola)
02.2026 - Current
Senior DevOps Engineer (SDE-3)
Krutrim (Ola)
08.2024 - 02.2026
System Debug Software Engineer
Intel
01.2018 - 08.2024
Senior Software Engineer
Aricent Technologies
01.2013 - 01.2018
Graduate Research Intern
National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL)
Master of Technology - Signal Processing
REVA Institute of Engineering And Technology