About
I lead the India data platform organisation for LKQ Corporation (NASDAQ: LKQ, Fortune 500, $14B revenue, 47,000 employees) — a 22-member team spanning Database Engineering, Data Engineering, BI/Reporting, and Data Quality/Governance, owning the enterprise data platform for 24/7 operations across North America and Europe. Twenty-one years in database engineering, and still in the technology. I lead from the front: architecture reviews, HA/DR design, production incident resolution, and code. How I lead: - Built the function from a solo seat to a 22-member organisation across five disciplines; promoted 3 to senior roles and mentored 20+ - Own the multi-year platform roadmap (2024–2027), approved annually at Senior Director level - Partner with global stakeholders across US/India follow-the-sun operations - Own the operating model — capacity planning, vendor management, hiring, performance management What I own: - A multi-engine estate — SQL Server (2000–2025), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch — at hundreds of terabytes, processing billions of row operations daily - A 100TB+ Dremio/Apache Iceberg lakehouse running 2,000+ Spark and Airflow pipelines - Data governance and compliance (SOX, GDPR); Azure database operations and hybrid estate What I've built: - A fleet-wide patch orchestration engine — parallel dispatch, per-server state machine, deterministic rollback — eliminating a manual patch window that consumed entire weekends - An AI-augmented diagnostic platform for our air-gapped estate — Go orchestrator, local LLM inference, MCP tool-calling across 18+ diagnostic services, bringing automated triage to a fleet with no external connectivity - PostgreSQL on OpenShift/Kubernetes — provisioning from weeks to hours - Led the database workstream of a full VMware-to-Hyper-V migration, near-zero downtime Track record: - Scaled operations 3x at 99.9%+ uptime for mission-critical global systems - 50+ zero-downtime migrations (SQL Server 2008–2025), including an early production move to SQL Server 2025 - Reduced incidents 45%; improved MTTR 60%; 100% SOX & GDPR compliance, zero critical findings Technical depth: SQL Server (2000–2025) • PostgreSQL • MySQL • Elasticsearch • Apache Iceberg • Spark • Airflow • Dremio • Always On / HA/DR • Kubernetes/OpenShift • Performance Tuning • Data Governance • Azure • T-SQL • PowerShell • Go Certifications: MCSE (Data Management & Analytics) • ITIL Foundation • PG Program in Data Engineering, Purdue University (2026) • Professional Certificate in Generative AI & ML, IIT Guwahati (2025) 📧 ramgck@gmail.com | 📱 +91-9980352339
Work experience
Manager, Data Operations — Database Platform Engineering at LKQ Corporation, Apr 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 6 mos, Bengaluru, NASDAQ: LKQ · Fortune 500 · $14B revenue · 47,000 employees · North America, Europe, Asia Reporting to Senior Director, Data Development, Operations & Intelligence Lead a 22-member database platform engineering organisation (1 team lead, 11 direct) owning a multi-engine estate — SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch — at hundreds-of-terabytes scale, plus a Dremio/Iceberg lakehouse at 100TB+ running 2,000+ scheduled pipelines. 99.9%+ availability for 24/7 multi-continent operations. - Senior technical escalation point and architectural decision-maker for the enterprise database platform; own architecture reviews, HA/DR design, and the multi-year roadmap - Architected a fleet-wide patch orchestration engine for 100+ instances covering Availability Groups, FCIs, standalone servers, SSRS and SSIS - Led the database workstream of a full VMware-to-Hyper-V datacenter migration, near-zero downtime - Designed and built an AI-augmented diagnostic platform in Go for an air-gapped environment - Implemented PostgreSQL on OpenShift (OKD/Kubernetes) — provisioning weeks to hours - Own SLOs, incident/problem/change management; cut incidents 45%, improved MTTR 60% - 100% SOX and GDPR compliance, zero critical findings
Lead Operations DBA at LKQ Corporation, Apr 2018 - Apr 2023 · 5 yrs 1 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
SME-DBA at LKQ Corporation, May 2014 - Mar 2018 · 3 yrs 11 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Information Management Senior Specialist at Xerox, Oct 2012 - May 2014 · 1 yr 8 mos, Bangalore
SME - DBA at AXA Technologies Shared Services, Oct 2010 - Oct 2012 · 2 yrs 1 mo
Network Engineer at First American (India) Pvt. Ltd, Aug 2008 - Oct 2010 · 2 yrs 3 mos, Bengaluru Area, India
System Administrator at Locus, Nov 2006 - Sep 2008 · 1 yr 11 mos, Bengaluru Area, India
