Thanigaivelan Bakthavachalam

Promoted in April 2022 for exceptional incident resolution and customer satisfaction, earning leadership recognition. Committed to achieving 99.999% high availability, I specialize in DNS routing issue resolution and collaborate effectively with global teams, excelling in communication and documentation.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Resolved multiple incidents promptly, ensuring customer satisfaction and adherence to SLAs, leading to a promotion for exceptional performance.
• Focused on achieving 99.999% high availability ("dark green days"), maintaining stability and reliability in a 12-hour shift pattern.
• Specialized in resolving DNS routing issues, leveraging knowledge and expertise to troubleshoot and provide effective solutions.
• Engaged in monitoring Splunk dashboards and acknowledging PagerDuty alerts, ensuring proactive identification and resolution of issues.
• Collaborated closely with diverse global teams, technical teams, account managers, and leadership to provide timely updates and communicate effectively.
• Documented issues comprehensively and participated in root cause analysis and retrospective sessions to drive continuous improvement and prevent recurrence of incidents.
• Contributed to the Ideathon by submitting multiple innovative ideas, including "Changealyze" for identifying change events using machine learning and "Mario Chaos Gaming Environment" for simulating incident scenarios in a gaming environment.

Balancing professional duties, I assumed significant property management responsibilities post my father's passing in 2021, supported by my resilient family. Orchestrating rental agreements and negotiations, I secured a notable deal with Wow! Momo, igniting my entrepreneurial journey. This experience fueled confidence, driving me towards startup investments and acquiring a Tata Indicash ATM franchise, all while maintaining steadfast dedication to my full-time role, supported by my pillar, my wife.

• Managed rental agreements and negotiations, ensuring optimal terms and conditions while fostering positive landlord-tenant relationships.
• Secured new agreements and facilitated a significant deal with Wow! Momo, showcasing negotiation skills and entrepreneurial acumen.
• Initiated investments in startups via community stock options, kickstarting a journey into angel investing and fostering innovation within the community.
• Acquired a franchise of Tata Indicash ATM, providing essential financial services to the neighboring residential community, enhancing convenience and accessibility.
• Successfully balanced these entrepreneurial pursuits with my full-time job, demonstrating exceptional time management and dedication to both personal and professional responsibilities, supported by the unwavering encouragement of my wife.

Experienced Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with a background in direct employment at PayPal, specializing in global fintech environments. Proven track record of ensuring high reliability and performance while collaborating with diverse teams to maintain mission-critical systems. Dedicated to creating and optimizing robust infrastructures for seamless user experiences.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Ensuring High Reliability: Design, implement, and maintain systems to achieve and sustain high levels of reliability, availability, and performance for critical services in a global fintech environment.
• Incident Management: Respond to and resolve incidents promptly, leveraging strong troubleshooting skills and collaborating with cross-functional teams to minimize service disruptions and meet SLAs.
• Automation and Tooling: Develop and enhance automation tools and monitoring systems to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and proactively identify and mitigate potential issues before they impact users.
• Performance Optimization: Analyze system performance metrics and implement optimizations to enhance scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness, ensuring seamless user experiences even during peak loads.
• Capacity Planning: Conduct capacity planning exercises to anticipate future growth and ensure that systems have adequate resources to handle increasing demand while maintaining optimal performance.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive continuous improvement initiatives, including post-incident reviews, root cause analysis, and implementation of preventive measures to enhance system resilience and minimize the risk of future incidents.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with development, operations, and product teams to align on reliability goals, implement best practices, and ensure that reliability considerations are incorporated throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Document system architectures, procedures, and best practices, and facilitate knowledge sharing sessions to empower team members and foster a culture of learning and collaboration.
• On-Call Rotation: Participate in an on-call rotation to provide 24/7 support for critical production systems, responding to alerts and incidents in a timely manner to maintain service availability and reliability.
• Adherence to Compliance and Security Standards: Ensure that systems and processes adhere to industry compliance and security standards, implementing appropriate controls and measures to protect sensitive data and maintain regulatory compliance.

Upon relocating to Chennai in December 2020, I continued my dedication to a leading US insurance client, focusing on training, providing support, and implementing innovative solutions amidst the challenges of the COVID era. Additionally, I led infrastructure change management initiatives, ensuring seamless transitions and validating implementations.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Facilitated sprint planning meetings, ensuring alignment on sprint goals, prioritization of tasks, and commitment to delivering value within designated timeframes.
• Led retrospective sessions to foster continuous improvement, facilitating open discussions, identifying areas for enhancement, and implementing action items to optimize team performance and efficiency.
• Led training initiatives for fellow team members, equipping them with the necessary skills and knowledge.
• Provided ongoing support and guidance to the team, offering innovative ideas to overcome challenges during the COVID era.
• Spearheaded infrastructure change management processes, from creation to presentation to approval boards, ensuring smooth implementation and validation.
• Acted as a key representative in incident calls, troubleshooting issues promptly to meet service level agreements.
• Demonstrated expertise in incident and problem management, serving as the subject matter expert on DNS, firewall, and load balancing troubleshooting.

Managed and led a remote team from Mexico for a leading US insurance client, spearheading a DevOps project. Collaborated with a diverse group to ensure end-to-end project delivery, leveraging Agile methodologies for seamless execution.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Managed the build and deployment of applications while leading the team and providing support to cross-functional teams.
• Expanded expertise in networking concepts, supporting changes related to F5 load balancing, firewall configurations, and DNS management.
• Coordinated certificate updates, liaising with certificate management teams to ensure smooth operations.
• Held the role of infrastructure change manager, overseeing change creation, presenting to approval boards, and finalizing implementations.
• Played a pivotal role in troubleshooting and incident resolution, representing the team in incident calls to meet SLAs.
• Demonstrated proficiency in incident and problem management, serving as a subject matter expert in DNS, firewall, and load balancing troubleshooting.
• Supported AWS stack creation using CloudFormation and monitored logs using Splunk.
• Facilitated the creation of Docker images for Node.js applications, collaborating closely with development partners to resolve build issues.
• Maintained records and documented work using Agile tools such as JIRA and Confluence.
• Exhibited expertise in Akamai Content Management Solution, onboarding multiple sites to ensure seamless access.
• Acted as the primary point of contact for release management and issue handling during monthly releases.

In the realm of Agile DevOps practices, have spearheaded operations within a dynamic environment, orchestrating the management of over 70 mixed servers, including both Windows and Linux systems. My focus on automation, integration, and configuration management has been pivotal in expediting application delivery, ensuring prompt deployment of web applications to our valued customers.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Oversaw and maintained a diverse server environment of 70+ servers, comprising both Windows and Linux systems, prioritizing uptime and reliability.
• Implemented automation, integration, monitoring, and configuration management strategies to optimize application delivery timelines.
• Utilized SQL database systems proficiently, executing scripts to streamline database operations and enhance efficiency.
• Orchestrated load balancing and proxying of system servers and components to ensure optimal performance and scalability.
• Led a team of 5 in providing production release support and monitoring, ensuring smooth deployments and uptime.
• Managed configuration and maintenance of Linux and Windows server environments, ensuring operational excellence and adherence to best practices.

During my tenure with a leading US bank client from 2013 to 2016, I specialized in DevOps, leveraging automation to streamline deployment processes and enhance project efficiency. With a keen understanding of Continuous Delivery principles, I proactively analyzed and resolved deployment issues, while also contributing to process improvements to ensure system scalability and reliability.

Roles and Responsibility :

• Developed automated deployment processes using configuration management technology, enhancing efficiency.
• Demonstrated expertise in DevOps principles and Continuous Delivery, optimizing project workflows.
• Proactively analyzed and resolved deployment issues, ensuring timely project delivery.
• Proposed and implemented process enhancements to bolster system scalability and reliability.
• Collaborated with Release Management to schedule and execute production deployments, ensuring adherence to best practices.
• Produced comprehensive release notes and deployment plans, ensuring smooth project transitions.
• Conducted thorough testing to verify component functionality and meet client expectations.
• Provided oversight and support for production environments, ensuring seamless operations.
• Evaluated new tools and technologies, offering recommendations to enhance project outcomes.
• Contributed to defining DevOps and quality standards, ensuring adherence across projects.
• Ensured compliance with established standards, policies, and procedures throughout project lifecycles.
• Maintained thorough documentation for all applications, aligning with industry standards and best practices.

My journey began with hands-on experience in Microsoft BI Suite and SQL Server, managing ETL processes and BI reporting for internal projects. I've meticulously crafted mappings and applied business rules, honing my skills

• Understand the data structure and meaning in both the source and the target BI systems.
• Identify data sources and assess their suitability.
• Create comprehensive source/target mappings for effective ETL processes.
• Apply business rules as transformations to ensure data integrity and relevance.
• Perform triage to troubleshoot and resolve issues promptly.
• Design and specify source data detection and extraction processes.
• Develop transformation code, logic, and programs for data manipulation.
• Build and conduct unit tests on data transformation processes for accuracy.
• Collaborate with production data teams to monitor and report on data conditions and quality.
• Design data clean-up processes to rectify discrepancies or inconsistencies.
• Modify and adapt ETL processes to accommodate changes in source systems and business requirements.