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Shankar Ramanathan

About

About me

Section titled “About me”

I’m a Platform Engineering Leader and SRE Architect with 11+ years of experience scaling cloud-native infrastructure and building high-performing platform teams. My recent leadership roles have focused on architecting self-service Kubernetes environments and supporting large-scale SaaS platforms encompassing over 100 microservices, 100 Kubernetes clusters, and 3k+ compute instances. I specialize in treating the internal platform as a product, driving operational excellence, and aligning technical roadmaps with business, security, and FinOps goals.

About my work

Section titled “About my work”
  • EKS & GitOps at Scale — Drove GitOps-based provisioning using Crossplane and Argo CD, reducing cluster setup times to 90 minutes. Eliminated all-cluster change risk via multi-tier deployment groups (canary to GA), cutting change failure blast radius to 10-15 clusters per wave and reducing failed change MTTR from ~4 hours to <30 minutes.
  • FinOps & Autoscaling — Integrated Karpenter and KEDA to handle 2-3x traffic surges while cutting pod scheduling latency from minutes to tens of seconds. Achieved ~30% per-core cost efficiency gains via workload right-sizing, Spot instances, and multi-arch Graviton node pools.
  • Progressive Delivery — Reduced CI/CD cycle times by 80% using KubeVela, Argo Rollouts, and ApplicationSets. Enabled rapid developer prototyping and achieved a 99.8% change success rate.
  • Security & Supply Chain — Enforced platform guardrails with Kyverno (policy-as-code) to prevent misconfigurations. Led initiatives to mitigate supply chain attack vectors by migrating base container images to Chainguard with SBOM support and SLSA provenance.
  • Reliability & Observability — Overhauled incident management and on-call rotations, reducing P1 median MTTR to under 60 minutes and cutting repeat critical incidents by 35% through blameless postmortems. Built deep visibility using Prometheus, Grafana, Victoria Metrics, Crossplane, and Terraform.
  • Team Scaling & Mentorship — Designed structured technical hiring pipelines and onboarding frameworks, improving new-hire time-to-productivity by

My Mantra

Section titled “My Mantra”
  • Platform as a Product - I believe in building “paved roads” for developers. Infrastructure should be self-serve, intuitive, and secure by default, allowing product teams to ship with high velocity.
  • Blameless Culturer - I prioritize systemic fixes over human blame. The most reliable systems are built by teams that feel psychologically safe to investigate root causes and implement automated guardrails.
  • Policy over Proces - Instead of relying on manual PR reviews for infrastructure compliance, I favor policy-as-code via Github Self-hosted Action runner framework and cluster policy enforcement (Kyverno) to automate governance and prevent misconfigurations before they reach production.
  • Data-Driven Engineering - Every architectural or cost optimization decision is validated through deep observability and progressive rollouts.

Certifications

Section titled “Certifications”
  • CKA — Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CNCF)
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Open to

Section titled “Open to”

Engineering Manager / Sr. Manager Platform Engineering / SRE Leadership roles.

  • Highly experienced across AWS, Kubernetes, GitOps pipelines, and multi-cluster scaling
  • Passionate about mentoring high-performing engineering teams and partnering with product/security leadership
  • Currently based out of GMT+5.30

Reach Me

Section titled “Reach Me”