Headline

Senior Engineering Manager | AIOps, SRE & Cloud Infrastructure Leader | Incident Management| Ex-VMware (300K+ VMs, 1,500 vCenters) | $1.48M Cost Savings | 99.999% Uptime

About

I lead engineering and SRE organizations that keep mission-critical, always-on infrastructure running at global scale — currently as Senior Engineering Manager at Calix, after 12 years at VMware progressing from System Engineer to SRE Lead. Over the past two years at Calix, I've delivered $1.48M in net annual savings and cost avoidance by moving off costly enterprise tooling (open-source observability via Zabbix, containerizing VM workloads onto Kubernetes/Rancher) and redesigning our talent pipeline around university hiring instead of expensive lateral hires. At VMware, I led the SRE organization responsible for SaaS and on-prem IaaS reliability across a 300,000+ VM, 1,500-vCenter environment spanning North America, EMEA, and APAC. Highlights: * Cut alert noise 96% (80,000 → 2,000/month) through AIOps (BigPanda) — CIO Award * Automated away 90% of P3, 55% of P2, and 40% of P1 incident tickets ("Project Boring") * Reduced incident notification time (MTTN) from 20 to 5 minutes and MTTA to 1 minute * Sustained 99.999% uptime across the Global Command Center I built Certified CCIE, ITIL Expert, RHCE, and VCP. Executive MBA (Jindal Global University); B.Tech in Computer Science (Singhania University). Open to conversations on AIOps, SRE transformation, and infrastructure cost governance at scale.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude

gemini

Work experience

Sr. Engineering Manager at Calix, Dec 2025 - Present · 10 mos, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

Engineering Manager at Calix, Apr 2024 - Dec 2025 · 1 yr 9 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area

Technical Operations Lead at VMware, Feb 2016 - Apr 2024 · 8 yrs 3 mos, Bangalore, − Providing deep technical leadership to a team of highly passionate and skilled engineers for a cross-functional, highly visible, operations team supporting the secure access services platform for corporate’s network − Identifying opportunities and driving the implementation of automation to improve service health, manageability, reliability, and technical documentation − Communicating on a deeply technical level with product engineering, project management and operations teams to improve and optimize products, improve infrastructure, and evolve services − Designing & delivering SDDC infrastructure to solve problems relating to mission critical services, and create solutions to prevent problems from recurring, with the goal being to automate response to all non-exceptional service conditions − Managing a 100% remote and geographically distributed team with 24/7 support including frequent 1:1s and leading other team meetings − Directing team processes and esnured adherence to SLOs, MTTRs, and MTTN and manging SRE a team of 15 members − Identifying and automating the toils for the services onboarded to the VMware command center − Following up with the 3rd party Vendors/SO for prompt resolution of major incidents

VMware Administrator at VMware, Mar 2012 - Feb 2016 · 4 yrs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, · Supporting 15000+ ESXi servers, 300 thousand+ VMs, 500+ vCenters/NSX, vSAN and underlying Type-1 hypervisors, Network, and storage components. · Implementing System Management Tools to provide monitoring and management of all Cloud infrastructures. · Ensuring implementation, operational support, maintenance, and optimization of IaaS in a 24×7 hosting environment. · Managing and resolving technical issues relating to the Private & Public Cloud platform (vCloud Director, vSphere, ESXi, NSX, Cisco UCS, Dell iDRAC, vSAN, HP Chassis, AWS). · Interfaced with users and systems engineers in order to resolve technical and user problems. · Engaged in troubleshooting issues in the VMware environment, the virtual systems, and the lower-level infrastructure. · Actively involved in building up and decommissioning new and outdated VMWare server systems. · Deployed and maintained enterprise Virtual Desktop Infrastructure environments. · Applied patches, update and upgrades to servers, workstations and stored images Working knowledge of supporting HP, Cisco UCS, and Dell Server hardware. · Planned and implemented vSphere [vCenter, NSX, vSAN, Horizon, UCS, iDRAC] stack upgrades. · Resolved issues and escalated problems with knowledgeable support and quality service.

NOC Systems Engineer at Cable&Wireless Worldwide, Mar 2008 - Jun 2011 · 3 yrs 4 mos, Bangalore, . Monitored Network (Cisco routers & Switches) and Infrastructure Appliances (DNS, DHCP, F5 Load balancers) for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. · Managed incidents and network & system performance within SLAs, OLAs, and KPIs. · Prepared Draft Deployment plans (DNS & DHCP) for the Faults and changes related tickets. · Extensively worked on problem management to identify reoccurring incidents and support service improvement plans to negate reoccurrence of incidents. · Carried out network diagnostics to re-mediate detected/reported network incidents

Education

Executive Development Program, Strategic Management, XLRI Jamshedpur

Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Computer Science, Singhania University