---
title: "Kishore Kumar AJ - Sr. Engineering Manager in Bengaluru | Tal"
description: "Meet Kishore Kumar AJ, Senior Engineering Manager | AIOps, SRE & Cloud Infrastructure Leader | Incident Management| Ex-VMware (300K+ VMs, 1,500 vCenters) | $1.48M Cost Savings | 99.999% Uptime based in Bengaluru. AI stack includes claude and gemini."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/kishore-kumar-aj/share-image"
---

# Kishore Kumar AJ on Tal

## 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

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/kishore-kumar-aj)

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