Sunil Dharpelly
Lead DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineering Lead
London (Open To Relocation) | Hyderabad
Summary
Lead DevOps / Platform Engineer with 10+ years of experience designing, operating, and scaling cloud-native platforms in regulated and high-availability environments. Strong background in AWS and Azure with hands-on ownership of CI/CD, infrastructure automation, reliability engineering, and observability. Proven track record of leading platform teams, reducing incidents, optimizing cloud costs, and enabling engineering teams to ship safely at scale.
Overview
13
13
years of professional experience
Work History
Lead DevOps Engineer
Kotak Mahindra Bank
08.2024 - Current
- Lead DevOps and platform engineering for a mobile banking platform comprising 22 core applications and 100+ microservices across Development, UAT, and Production environments.
- Own CI/CD strategy using Azure DevOps, implementing environment-specific controls and approval workflows, resulting in a ~60% reduction in deployment time and improved release reliability.
- Implemented Kong Gateway and Istio service mesh to standardise API ingress, service-to-service security, and traffic management.
- Built centralised observability using AppDynamics, ELK (Kibana, FluentBit), and PagerDuty, significantly improving MTTR and on-call effectiveness.
- Drove cloud cost optimisation initiatives (autoscaling, reserved capacity, idle resource cleanup), achieving ~30% reduction in annual cloud spend.
- Mentor and lead a DevOps team of 8–15 engineers, acting as escalation point during major production incidents, audits, and DR exercises.
Lead DevOps Engineer
Digbi Health
07.2022 - 07.2024
- Led DevOps transformation for cloud-native platforms on AWS, supporting microservices-based Java applications.
- Standardised CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure provisioning using Terraform and CloudFormation, improving deployment consistency and reliability.
- Designed and operated Kubernetes-based deployment models to enable horizontal scalability and high availability.
- Owned cloud cost optimisation, security posture, and disaster recovery readiness.
- Mentored engineers and improved onboarding through reusable platform templates, documentation, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
Senior DevOps Engineer
Amazon Development Center
01.2017 - 06.2022
- Designed and operated scalable DevOps solutions supporting applications deployed across multi-region environments (NA, EU, JP).
- Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines enabling automated deployments with minimal downtime.
- Administered secure AWS infrastructure including IAM, EC2, S3, RDS, Redshift, and Lambda.
- Automated infrastructure and deployments using Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes, improving consistency and scalability.
- Collaborated closely with development and QA teams to improve release quality and operational readiness.
Software Developer
Cold Cup
11.2012 - 03.2014
- Designed and developed responsive, high-performance websites aligned with client requirements.
- Collaborated with stakeholders to validate UI/UX concepts and establish front-end best practices.
- Ensured cross-browser and cross-device compatibility for user-facing components.
Education
MBA - Management
Osmania University
Hyderabad, India 04.2001 -
B.Tech - Computer Science & Engineering
JNTU
Hyderabad, India 04.2001 -
Skills
Cloud & Platform Architecture (AWS, Azure)
Timeline
Lead DevOps Engineer
Kotak Mahindra Bank
08.2024 - Current
Lead DevOps Engineer
Digbi Health
07.2022 - 07.2024
Senior DevOps Engineer
Amazon Development Center
01.2017 - 06.2022
Software Developer
Cold Cup
11.2012 - 03.2014
MBA - Management
Osmania University
04.2001 -
B.Tech - Computer Science & Engineering
JNTU
04.2001 -