Sarath Kumar
Distributed Systems & Cloud Infrastructure Architect | DevOps & Kafka | 12 Years In Tech
No. 164B, Sri Sai Nagar, 7th Cross Street, Thuraipakkam, Chennai - 600 097.
Summary
Dynamic Staff System Software Engineer with expertise in Kafka and cloud infrastructure, currently at FourKites, Inc. Proven track record in enhancing product quality and customer satisfaction through innovative and rigorous scalable solutions. Skilled in CI/CD pipelines and observability, complemented by strong leadership and collaboration abilities.
Overview
13
13
years of professional experience
1
1
Language
7
7
years of post-secondary education
1
1
Certificate
Work History
Staff Software Engineer
FourKites, Inc.
07.2022 - Current
- Managed Kafka as a Service (KaaS) for the organization, handling over 500,000 messages per second while maintaining 99.99% uptime SLA.
- Led the seamless migration of Cloudera Kafka, OpenSource Kafka, and HDInsight Kafka across various cloud platforms to Confluent, ensuring zero data loss and uninterrupted service.
- Architected and deployed Kafka Connect, Prometheus, Grafana, MirrorMaker 1.0, and MirrorMaker 2.0 for efficient data replication, monitoring, and observability.
- Directed a team of five engineers to maintain high availability of KaaS, supporting the organization’s critical messaging infrastructure.
- Automated Kafka operations and administrative tasks using Python, improving efficiency and reducing manual intervention.
- Leveraging AI-driven solutions for dashboarding and observability, significantly reducing build time and enhancing system monitoring.
- Administered Kafka clusters across multiple cloud environments, both as self-managed and fully managed solutions.
- Conducted PoCs on messaging queue systems, including RabbitMQ, Apache Pulsar, Service Bus, and Event Bus, to enhance the organization's messaging capabilities.
- Partnered with cross-functional teams to ensure comprehensive test coverage for all system components.
- Designed and deployed a new infrastructure from scratch, enabling seamless service migration with zero downtime.
- Extensive experience in designing and implementing serverless architectures on AWS, optimizing scalability, cost efficiency, and performance like AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda etc.
- Extensive experience in AWS services, including EC2, S3, Lambda, SNS, SQS, SES, MSK, VPC, RDS, DynamoDB, API Gateway, CloudWatch, IAM, DynamoDb, ElastiBeanStalk, IAM and SecretsManager, with a strong focus on building scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions.
- Automated cloud infrastructure provisioning and configuration management using Terraform and Ansible, enhancing scalability, efficiency, and reliability.
- Improved product quality through rigorous testing, proactively identifying and resolving critical issues before release.
- Well-versed in Agile methodologies and Scrum framework, with experience in leading and participating in sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives to drive efficient software development and continuous delivery.
- Enhanced customer satisfaction by efficiently troubleshooting and resolving reported defects.
Lead Cloud Architect
BMW India
12.2021 - 05.2022
- Work with product management to define, architect, prioritize, and deliver new software product features.
- Generate conceptual/logical architectures, and risk assessments.
- Initiate and lead formal and informal reviews of ideas and technical objectives – promote ideas and practices which drive innovation and smooth releases.
- Supporting technically for Orchestrating and automating Infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines and Security findings.
- Supporting the developers – making sure that the developers are able to realize the architecture, by a combination of mentoring and direct involvement.
- Verifying the implementation – ensuring the delivered system is consistent with the agreed architecture, and will meet the requirements.
Senior Systems Engineer
Fourkites, Inc.
12.2019 - 12.2021
- Architecting the entire Kafka services in the organization. Currently handling around billion of messages in a minute to handle the production traffic.
- Worked on an organization specific project to build the Kafka as a Service (KAAS) as an individual contributor. This will be a replacement for the tradition messaging queuing system in the organization. The Infrastructure are entirely automated using Ansible and Terraform, where the Kafka and Zookeeper services are managed using Cloudera in an automated fashion with the help of Python Scripts & Ansible Playbooks.
- Created the entire Kafka on the AWS Autoscaling group, which the scaling will be triggered automatically using Cloudwatch events and the associated lambda script triggers the Ansible playbooks for Scaling in/out of the cluster.
- Individual contributor for the entire Kafka project for the organization, who is responsible to develop, monitor, testing and life-cycles all the Kafka changes w.r.t brokers and clients.
- Observability - To measure the entire usage of the Kafka systems and its services based on the measures and the alerts from the automated containerzation of Prometheus & Grafana integrated with multi-channel platform to keep the systems more effectively.
- Closely worked with multiple team developers to tune and enhancing the Kafka clients for better usage.
- Created a CI/CD pipeline for a production services includes the end to end automation test results using Docker and Jenkins.
- Working with Systems Engineering team to decoupling the Monolithic services to a micro services. This will make the other services to be deployed independently without any dependencies.
- Created AD on the AWS Infrastructure to enable the organisation to have the centralized user and rights management, as well as centralized control over the systems.
DevOps Engineer
FourKites, Inc.
04.2018 - 11.2019
- Build an automated deployment in Jenkins for UI releases.
- Integrated codebase with CodeClimate for quality of codes and for continuous deployment.
- Handling AWS infrastructure billings and responsible for the resources that are being used in AWS.
- Automated infrastructure and application related queries through Python and ansible for day-to-day activities.
- Responsible for migrating the entire application from one region to another region.
- Integrated and managing Docker builds for automated unit tests along with Jenkins.
- Take over SRE Infra On-Call issues - Debugging application issue using Newrelic, Cloudwatch, LogEnteries.
- Managing ElasticCache (Standalone & Cluster) for making the application into a single tenant.
- Working with Azure for migrating the application.
- Integrated DeepSecurity across all the servers hosted on AWS for against zero-day malware and network-based attack.
- Automated API services calls using PostMan to minimize the querying and checking time for a particular task (Access providing/revoking/deleting etc)
- Having a piece of basic knowledge in handling Hadoop and Kafka Clusters. Migrated RDS, ES to the standalone nodes without having a downtime using AWS DMS and AWS ES Manual snapshot method respectively.
- Building few micro services in Kubernetes along with Cassandra and Kafka with multi master replication setup.
Senior Systems Engineer
8K Miles Software Solution PVT Ltd. (Trimble Inc)
04.2017 - 04.2018
- Worked on DotNet project as the application is built on Windows.o
- Implementated Automation script to put encrypted data in S3.
- Worked on automation for application written on Python with AWS SDK (Boto)
- Worked on Runscope tool that automate the application testing by doing API calls continously to avoid breaching the SLA.
- Led five member team to make the application run 24/7 without any disruptions. o Worked on Jenkins automation for application that will make the deployment ease and robust with no downtime.
- Worked on major AWS services like Lambda, DynamoDB, Route53, VPC, S3 etc.
- Worked on AWS IoT as few of the channel in the application works on MQTTT protocol.
- Worked on tools like Datadog, Pingdom, Runscope, Rundeck and Sumologic for better and enhanced Infrastructure services.
Systems Engineer
Market Simplified Inc
07.2014 - 04.2017
- Implemented automated solutions with BASH and Python scripts to deploy the Middleware in the Linux Servers. o Restructured infrastructure for fail over and disaster prevention with client co-ordination for the clients Nation Stock Exchange, Kotak Securities and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
- Led complete site relocation project involving up to 25 Linux in-house servers successfully completing project in a single weekend for ThinkMarkets – a UK based trading brokerage.
- Led complete site relocation project and deploying cloud watch monitoring’s inAWS Cloud for OptionsXpress by Charles Schwab, US.
- Played a major role in handling vulnerabilities fix on all production environments with a minimal downtime.
- Coordinated resources with varied programming expertise to create a holistic solution to system update and service interruption issues.
- Created a process for system updates to minimize risk of application failures.
- Enhancing monitoring by scripting manually to pull reports on high utilization of servers during market and important trading days.
- Played an IAM role in handling all US based client servers hosted on Amazon Web Services.
- Managing a team of 5 to support client Infrastructure 24x7 and training them to get used to the monitoring hierarchy and following the escalation matrix.
- Automation bash script to install Nagios, NRPE, Plugins and NRPE in 5 minutes which hardly takes 2 hours to setup the entire system manually.
- Monitored system performance and prevented resource exhaustion using ssh, vmstat, iostat, and netstat during market start hours in order to avoid downtimes.
- Led a role in setting up in-house Repository using GITHUB open source project. All application and server configurations are committed to that repository which can be accessed globally developed keeping automation in mind.
Linux Server Administrator
Elumina Elearning Services Pvt Ltd
12.2013 - 06.2014
- User administration and setting up work environments, installation and configuration of applications.
- Troubleshooting boot-related, system-related problems and LAN problems.
- Managing all development and staging environment in Amazon Cloud(AWS).
- Packages and patches Administration: Installing, upgrading, query and Remove
- Software Packages using RPM/YUM/APT/DEB/GEM.
- Configuration and maintenance of FTP, SSH, DNS, MailServer in Linux.
- Providing automated backup, restoration and disaster recovery in Production and all local environments.
- Configuring Monit daemon inside server to monitor process checks
- Configuration of Nagios and Newrelic(browser) Monitoring tools.
- Have knowledge in Google Apps setup and domain binding with Godaddy and Hostgator.
- Configuring and installing Moodle – open source learning tool
- Configuring and installing Prestashop – open source e-commerce tool
- Configuring and installing Wordpress – Open source blogging tool
- Having knowledge in Amazon AWS, S3 servers setup using Admin Console.
- Configuration of S3cmd to sync latest files to Amazon S3.
System Support Engineer
Kaspon Tech Works (Market Simplified Inc)
05.2012 - 12.2013
- Played as a technical support engineer in monitoring application and servers on a daily routine
- Create, Manage and Delete user accounts and groups for Linux servers.
- Creating secure login for Users using Keygen
- Performing weekly maintenance for Linux based servers.
- Periodic backup of data personal Details
Education
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T J Institute of Technology, Chennai
06.2007 - 11.2011
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LittleAngelsMat.Hr.Sec.School, Chennai
05.2005 - 04.2007
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LittleAngelsMat.Hr.Sec.School, Chennai
05.2004 - 04.2005
Skills
Cloud Infrastructure
DevOps
Database
Observability
Scripting Tools
IaC
CI/CD Pipelines
Agile
Cloud Architecture Design
Kafka(OpenSource/Cloudera/Confluent)
Team leadership
Python
Terraform & Ansible
Timeline
Staff Software Engineer
FourKites, Inc.
07.2022 - Current
Lead Cloud Architect
BMW India
12.2021 - 05.2022
Senior Systems Engineer
Fourkites, Inc.
12.2019 - 12.2021
AWS Solutions Architect Associate
07-2018
DevOps Engineer
FourKites, Inc.
04.2018 - 11.2019
Senior Systems Engineer
8K Miles Software Solution PVT Ltd. (Trimble Inc)
04.2017 - 04.2018
Systems Engineer
Market Simplified Inc
07.2014 - 04.2017
Linux Server Administrator
Elumina Elearning Services Pvt Ltd
12.2013 - 06.2014
System Support Engineer
Kaspon Tech Works (Market Simplified Inc)
05.2012 - 12.2013
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T J Institute of Technology, Chennai
06.2007 - 11.2011
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LittleAngelsMat.Hr.Sec.School, Chennai
05.2005 - 04.2007
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LittleAngelsMat.Hr.Sec.School, Chennai
05.2004 - 04.2005
Certification
AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Disclaimer
I hereby declare that the above-mentioned information is correct up to my knowledge and I bear the responsibility for the correctness of the above-mentioned particulars.