Headline

Engineering Manager - Kong | Ex-Dream11

About

Engineering leader focused on building infrastructure teams and platforms from the ground up. Across three companies, I've consistently taken on the earliest, least-defined stage of building - joining as the first engineer or first hire on a team, and owning everything from architecture to hiring as the team and platform took shape. Kong - First SRE in the India office. Grew the team to 9 and took our managed gateway platform from prototype to a PCI DSS-certified product with multi-million dollar ARR. Now own architecture and reliability across 250+ Kubernetes clusters on AWS, GCP, and Azure. DreamX (Dream11 Org) - First engineer on the platform team. Owned infrastructure end-to-end, including migrating a live payments platform from VMs to containers while maintaining PCI-DSS compliance. Insider.in - Led a two-person team scaling platform support from 1 to 9 business divisions, designing the multi-tenant isolation and deployment strategy from scratch. I do my best work in the early, undefined stage of building - fewer playbooks, more judgment calls, full ownership of the outcome. Open to connecting with anyone building infrastructure or platform teams from zero.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

claude

codex

opencode

Work experience

Engineering Manager at Kong Inc., Nov 2025 - Present · 10 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India · Hybrid, • Owning architecture and reliability for 250+ Kubernetes clusters across AWS, Azure, and GCP in 20+ regions. Designed the multi-cloud provisioning layer, cluster lifecycle automation, and region expansion strategy. • Led PCI DSS certification end-to-end - Kong’s first certified product. Designed network segmentation and encryption boundaries; drove implementation across platform, infra, and application teams. • Built the Managed Gateways SRE org from founding engineer to 9 in India. Hired across levels, established career ladders, ran calibrations, and mentored two engineers into senior ownership roles - reducing single-person dependency on critical systems. • Owning the roadmap and execution cadence for the platform team. Introduced quarterly planning, architecture review gates, code review standards, and release engineering practices, improving sprint predictability and deployment confidence. • Operating as the technical voice for the Managed Gateways platform in product and leadership forums - influencing product direction, aligning engineering priorities with business strategy, and driving architectural tradeoffs that span beyond the immediate team across Kong’s broader infrastructure org. • Shipped key platform features - Managed Cache, provisioning reliability improvements, and multi-cloud hardening - that supported the product’s growth from pre-revenue to multi-million dollar ARR. • Engineering lead for marquee customer escalations: root-cause production issues, shipping architectural fixes, and running enablement for support teams - reducing escalation volume and directly preventing churn.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Kong Inc., Jul 2024 - Nov 2025 · 1 yr 5 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India · Hybrid, • Redesigned the provisioning layer from a bare-bones prototype to a production-grade system - built cloud-specific API abstractions, reconciliation controllers, and enabled GCP as a new deployment target alongside AWS and Azure. • Drove SLA from 99% to 99.99% through chaos engineering (fault injection across network, compute, storage), comprehensive observability (metrics, traces, structured logs), and runbooks tied to specific failure modes. • Architected a serverless gateway platform running 3,000+ instances with sub-30s cold start. Built Kubernetes-native scheduling with namespace-level isolation and resource quotas; hardened to 99% SLA for production SMB workloads. • Defined observability architecture: signal taxonomy, alerting thresholds and SLO dashboards. Mentored the Ops team and merged them into SRE, establishing shared on-call rotations and a culture of incident ownership.

Back End Developer at Dream11, Feb 2020 - Jul 2024 · 4 yrs 6 mos, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Innovative Technology Leader: - Orchestrated a seamless transition from traditional to container-based architecture, ensuring PCI-DSS compliance. - Spearheaded a 60% cost reduction across environments, skillfully optimizing resource allocation. - Pioneered the development of an efficient asynchronous data analysis pipeline and platform, aligning technology with cost-effectiveness. Cloud and Platform Expertise: - Engineered an internal Kubernetes cluster lifecycle manager with Crossplane and a controller pattern, streamlining operations. - Led the development of a multi-tenant authentication platform, garnering recognition on the AWS Blog. - Contributed to the creation of a scalable platform accommodating ~200M users with 11.5M concurrent users. Enhanced Developer Practices: - Elevated developer experience and security through the implementation of a streamlined CI process. - Developed a versatile multi-cloud platform supporting diverse developer environments. Infrastructure Optimization: - Achieved a remarkable ~50% reduction in infrastructure costs, demonstrating a commitment to both efficiency and developer satisfaction.

DevOps Engineer at Insider.in, Sep 2018 - Feb 2020 · 1 yr 6 mos, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, - Enhancing and maintaining the core architecture while maintaining scalability using Docker and Kubernetes. - Enhanced stability of the monitoring and logging using Prometheus and ELK stack. - Building a CI/CD pipeline using CircleCI for a micro-service architecture - Maintaining and administering cloud resources on AWS including but not limited to : VPC, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, CloudFormation, Lambda, ECS, CloudWatch, Route53

Software Intern at Blazeclan Technologies, May 2017 - Jul 2017 · 3 mos, Pune Area, India, Being a software development intern, my manager trusted me with some responsibility in the R&D department of the organization and I was assigned to learn and provide different methods with which Spring Batch Framework can be implemented within our projects and as well as to evaluate its effects on the performance of the projects.

Education

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.), Computer Science, UPES

12th, Computer Science, KV NO 2 GCF