Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
github.com/arunvelsriram | linkedin.com/in/arunvelsriram | arunvelsriram.dev
Platform Engineer with 10+ years of hands-on experience designing cloud-native infrastructure, automating complex systems, and building backend services at scale. Strong open-source background with a consistent bias for reducing toil through automation.
Programming Languages
Python, GoLang, Java
Infrastructure and DevOps
- Automation and Config Management: Shell Scripting, Terraform, Ansible
- CI/CD Tools: GoCD, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions
- Container and Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
- Cloud Platforms: AWS, GCP, Azure
Data Engineering
- Data Pipelines and Orchestration: Apache Airflow
- Data Processing and Streaming: Spark (PySpark), Pandas, SQL, Kafka
AI Tools
GitHub Copilot, Claude
2024 – Present
Tech Stack: Azure, AKS, ACA, GitHub Actions, Terraform
- Driving platform standardisation across a large, multi-team organisation by establishing consistent processes, tooling, and ways of working.
- Treating the platform as a product with internal engineering teams as users, improving Developer Experience through better tooling, self-service capabilities, and cross-team collaboration.
- Hardening infrastructure security and bringing organisational consistency through policy enforcement, access controls, standardised base images, improving visibility via security tools like Wiz, and documented runbooks.
- Building and managing cloud-native infrastructure on Azure (AKS, ACA) with GitHub Actions-based CI/CD pipelines.
2015 – 2024
Tech Stack: Kubernetes, Cilium CNI, Cilium Clustermesh, GoLang, GCP, PostgreSQL, Terraform, Terragrunt, Hashicorp Vault, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana
- Led a platform team of 5 engineers supporting 7-8 product teams building a multi-tenant trading application across Android, iOS and Web (Flutter).
- Automated infrastructure setup on Kubernetes using Terraform and Terragrunt, enabling faster onboarding of new services with cross-cutting concerns like auth, tracing, consistent logging and ingress routes out of the box.
- Set up Cilium CNI enabled Kubernetes clusters connected via Cilium Cluster Mesh with transparent Wireguard encryption for all inter-cluster traffic.
- Established observability across the platform using OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Prometheus and Grafana, giving teams consistent visibility into their services.
- Managed config and secret management using Hashicorp Vault, reducing duplication and risk across environments.
- CI/CD using GitLab CI and ArgoCD.
Tech Stack: Python, PySpark, Pandas, SQL, Flask, Apache Airflow, AWS, AWS EMR, Kafka, Terraform, Aerospike, Kubernetes, GoLang
- Led the building of a data platform powering hyper-personalised promotions delivered to customers via calls, SMS, push notifications, WhatsApp and in-app banners across web and mobile.
- Automated the entire AWS data platform including EMR, Glue Crawlers, S3 and Athena Workgroups using Terraform across environments, enabling data analysts and business teams to self-serve infrastructure without engineering bottlenecks.
- Developed and scheduled PySpark jobs on AWS EMR to process 200-500 GB of data for transformation, eligibility calculation and ingestion into Aerospike DB.
- Set up Change Data Capture (CDC) using Kafka and Kafka Sink Connectors to stream near real-time changes from Aerospike into Apache Hudi Delta Lake on S3.
- Set up a privacy service on a single on-premise machine using Docker Compose with Spark and Apache Airflow to scrub PII data (masking, removal, tokenisation) before sending it to AWS for processing.
- Implemented data quality checks across pipeline stages using Great Expectations.
- Took full ownership of a GoLang microservice responsible for serving personalised offers on web and mobile, covering development, testing and deployment.
- CI/CD pipelines using GoCD.
Tech Stack: Kubernetes, GoLang, GCP, NodeJS, PostgreSQL, Terraform, Consul, Prometheus, Grafana
- Containerised 100+ microservices across multiple repositories and set up fresh Kubernetes infrastructure on GCP GKE to support international expansion, starting with ride-hailing and food delivery and scaling to quick commerce and logistics.
- Built and open sourced Stevedore, a Terraform-inspired wrapper around Helm and Kubernetes APIs for deploying Helm Charts consistently across multiple clusters, solving a real scale problem across 15+ teams.
- Built configuration and secret management solutions to eliminate duplicate configs and secrets across environments during microservice migration.
- Built a Pull Request based access management system for Kubernetes using Terraform and RBAC.
- Connected multiple Kubernetes clusters using Hashicorp Consul to overcome Node IP address limitations.
- Set up system and application monitoring and alerting using Prometheus and Grafana.
- CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI.
Tech Stack: Ruby, Sinatra, JavaScript, AWS, CloudFront, Rackspace, Ansible, Packer, GoCD, Drupal
- Developed and maintained backend APIs for the public-facing marketing website of a global organisation using Ruby and Sinatra, including managing a home-grown headless CMS.
- Improved website load times significantly for users in China by migrating to AWS CloudFront, leveraging its Hong Kong edge server to resolve accessibility issues.
- Managed a legacy Drupal CMS used for the organisation's blog.
- Automated Linux VM provisioning on Rackspace using Packer and Ansible, including GoCD server and agent setup.
- CI/CD pipelines using GoCD.
- docker-time-sync-agent - Tool to prevent time drift in Docker for Mac's HyperKit VM (150+ stars)
- kube-fzf - Command-line fuzzy searching for Kubernetes resources (200+ stars)
- utils - Docker image full of utilities, Swiss Army Knife for Infrastructure Engineers (200+ stars)
- lazy-connect - Fuzzy search and connect to IPSec VPNs automatically (50+ stars)
- stevedore - Terraform-inspired wrapper around Helm and Kubernetes APIs for deploying Helm Charts across multiple clusters
- kube-tmuxp - Isolated Kubernetes context within tmux sessions for managing multiple K8s clusters
- sftp-exporter - Prometheus metrics exporter for SFTP
- save-my-ears - Launch agent that resets volume to a safe level whenever headphones or earphones are connected to your Mac
2011 – 2015
CGPA: 7.8