Hi, I’m
Soma Sundaram
Information Technology
Chennai,TN
Summary
Head of SRE leading reliability for retail banking systems across a 10+ team member SRE team. Defines error budget strategy, drives blameless RCA for 8+ incidents per month for recurring incidents, and automates 10+ manual production tasks to reduce toil across production services. Aligns infrastructure and IT Ops ownership to improve availability across a multi-country banking footprint.
Overview
20
years of professional experience
Work History
Equity Bank Group
Head of SRE
05.2025 - Current
Job overview
- Lead a team of around 15 SRE team members supporting the retail banking division at head office.
- Define SRE strategy for production reliability and availability across Equity Group operations in 6 countries.
- Drive RCA for weekly and monthly major incidents, tracking blameless action items to strengthen service stability.
- Coordinate shared ownership of infrastructure and IT Ops applications, reducing manual toil through targeted automation and runbook improvements.
- Support monitoring, observability, and on-call rotation management to improve response readiness across production systems.
NatWest Group
Site Reliability Engineer
10.2022 - 04.2025
Job overview
- Resolve 5-10 incidents per sprint across microservices and deployment workflows while keeping support queues moving.
- Supported microservices on Tomcat by handling deployments and incident management across production support activities.
- Handled deployment issues in Artifactory, GitLab, TeamCity, Kafka, and the bank deployment tool during release activities.
- Managed the SQL database lifecycle and supported application maintenance in Oracle and Sybase environments.
- Worked in Scrum and SRE ways of working to support migration from data center to cloud technologies.
- Onboarded new servers and services in Splunk, managed SSL certificates in AWS CloudFront, and used Postman for API support.
HCL Technologies
Technical Specialist
09.2021 - 09.2022
Job overview
- Reduced incident resolution time by 5% through faster triage and escalation of weekly support issues.
- Maintained application uptime of 9995% while supporting trader-facing fixed income systems.
- Troubleshot bond and securities trading issues, guiding users through buy and sell activity in the fixed income platform.
- Performed identity and access management activities and maintained data records for front-office traders.
- Analyzed bond and equity rules, traced application dependencies, and delivered solutions when issues stalled trading workflows.
- Supported application enhancement roadmaps and standards while updating Confluence with the latest changes for the team.
- Coordinated weekly incidents and changes, partnered with the Disaster Recovery team, and managed backup schedules and data cleanup tasks.
Royal Bank of Scotland
Technical Specialist
09.2013 - 08.2021
Job overview
- Managed a team of 8 members supporting multiple client onboarding applications.
- Provided application support for client onboarding systems across production and weekend release cycles.
- Managed change and incident management activities to stabilize applications and coordinate timely recovery.
- Led annual disaster recovery testing to support compliance and validate application readiness.
- Drove continuous improvement activities to reduce recurring issues and prevent outages.
- Trained new joiners and facilitated sessions for business and internal teams on application processes.
- Coordinated with QA, downstream teams, and release stakeholders on IAM roadmap and standards work.
Tata consultancy services
Technical Manager
05.2012 - 09.2013
Job overview
- Maintained 9995% application uptime through monitoring, alert review, and timely production support actions.
- Resolved 30 incidents per shift and restored application stability for Credit Suisse support queues.
- Managed application support for Credit Suisse, triaging production issues and coordinating resolution across technical teams.
- Performed root cause analysis and documented recurring failure patterns to reduce repeat incidents.
- Supported release and change management activities, validating production readiness before deployment windows.
- Used SQL and Splunk to investigate errors, trace logs, and accelerate issue diagnosis.
- Maintained runbooks and coordinated on-call handoffs to improve operational consistency across support shifts.
Zensar TechnologiesIndia, Maharastra
Technical Support Lead for CLSA
06.2011 - 04.2012
Job overview
- Led technical support team for the clients traded through the Brokerage firm CLSA, prioritizing escalations and maintaining service consistency.
- Resolved database Unix and other technical issues related to active trading in NSE and BSE.
- Coached support staff on troubleshooting methods, ticket handling, and customer communication.
- Monitored incident queues, assigned cases, and ensured timely resolution of critical requests.
HCL TechnologiesBangalore, Karanataka
Senior Support Analyst
05.2006 - 06.2010
Job overview
- Resolved complex support tickets, ensuring accurate troubleshooting and timely issue closure.
- Led incident escalation efforts, coordinating resolution across technical teams and stakeholders.
- Analyzed recurring support issues, identifying root causes and recommending process improvements.
- Maintained detailed case documentation, knowledge bases, and handoff notes for consistent support delivery.
Education
University of MadrasChennai
from Computer Science
10-2003
Skills
IT operations- SRE and Devops Leadership
Site Reliability Engineering & Azure DevOps
Banking System monitoring - (ELK, Dynatrace and Datadog
Incident, Problem and Reliability Management
Snowflake, Splunk
SQL, PLSQL, Unix, Shell Scripting
Runbook automation
Service level objectives
Timeline
Head of SRE
Equity Bank Group
05.2025 - Current
Site Reliability Engineer
NatWest Group
10.2022 - 04.2025
Technical Specialist
HCL Technologies
09.2021 - 09.2022
Technical Specialist
Royal Bank of Scotland
09.2013 - 08.2021
Technical Manager
Tata consultancy services
05.2012 - 09.2013
Technical Support Lead for CLSA
Zensar Technologies
06.2011 - 04.2012
Senior Support Analyst
HCL Technologies
05.2006 - 06.2010
University of Madras
from Computer Science