Namit Tiwari · Gurugram, India · open to relocation

I build the platforms that keep India's biggest apps online.

Banking at Kotak, e-commerce at Meesho, travel at Traveloka — for eight years my job has been the same: when millions of people tap the app, everything underneath just works.

See my work Download résumé
  • ₹7 Cr/yrsaved by replacing a vendor service mesh
  • 70 → 20 minbank disaster-recovery time
  • 300+services moved to Kubernetes
  • 3 mo → 1 wkinfrastructure delivery time
  • 13T+datapoints monitored per day

01 · About

The short version

I'm Namit. If you've opened Kotak's mobile banking app or ordered on Meesho, my infrastructure carried that tap. I'm currently Deputy Vice President for SRE at Kotak Mahindra Bank, hand-picked by the CTO to rebuild the platform under Mobile Banking 2.0, leading a team of eight engineers.

I started as the first DevOps hire on teams that had nothing — no automation, no standards, no monitoring — and built the practice from scratch, three companies in a row. These days I spend as much time on AI as on infrastructure: I build systems where an AI does the 3 a.m. investigation, so humans don't have to.

  • Platform engineering

    Reusable building blocks so shipping infrastructure takes a week, not a quarter.

  • Reliability & disaster recovery

    Failovers that are rehearsed and timed — not promised in a document.

  • AI operations

    AI agents that investigate incidents and draft the fix before a human picks up the pager.

  • Cost optimization

    Same platform, smaller bill — 25–55% cuts at three companies.

02 · Experience

Eight years, four companies

  1. Mar 2024 — present

    Kotak Mahindra Bank

    Banking · India's leading private bank

    • Deputy Vice President — SRE / DevOpsMar 2024 — present

    Hand-picked by the CTO to lead infrastructure for the bank's highest-priority project, Mobile Banking 2.0. Managing up to 8 engineers.

    • Cut infrastructure delivery from 3 months to 1 week with reusable Terraform modules — every digital lending product launched on time because of it.
    • Led the migration from a vendor service mesh (Tetrate) to self-managed Istio across 7 production clusters, zero downtime — ₹7 Cr/year saved and no vendor lock-in.
    • Built Helios, an AI incident-response platform: when production breaks, it gathers the evidence and writes the root-cause analysis in minutes instead of hours.
    • Re-architected disaster recovery with automated failover — recovery time down from 70 to 20 minutes, proven in drills, for RBI-regulated workloads.
    • Cut cloud spend 25% (₹25 lakh/month) through capacity planning, right-sizing, and automation.

    🏆 Star Performer / MVP + Top Performer, two consecutive years

  2. Apr 2021 — Mar 2024

    Meesho

    E-commerce · one of India's fastest-growing platforms

    • Lead SRE / DevSecOpsJun 2023 — Mar 2024
    • Lead DevOps EngineerFeb 2022 — Jun 2023
    • DevOps Engineer IIApr 2021 — Jan 2022

    Joined as an engineer, left leading SRE and DevSecOps — building the platform practice from scratch along the way.

    • Migrated 300+ services to Kubernetes with auto-healing and self-service infrastructure — teams shipped without waiting on an ops queue.
    • Led the observability transformation: a monitoring platform handling 13+ trillion datapoints a day.
    • Designed the WAF and firewall defenses (Cloudflare, Akamai) that blocked high-volume attacks during peak sale events.
    • Introduced org-wide change management: audit logging, release validation gates, and rollback-aware CI/CD.

    🏆 Act As An Owner award

  3. Apr 2019 — Apr 2021

    Traveloka

    Travel tech · Southeast Asia's leading travel platform

    • DevOps EngineerApr 2019 — Apr 2021

    Cloud infrastructure across regional engineering teams.

    • Reduced infrastructure costs by 55% through reservation planning, container migration, and auto-scaling.
    • Built the AWS multi-account strategy and executed a zero-downtime migration onto it; rolled out infrastructure-as-code across regional teams.

    🏆 Cost Reduction Superhero award

  4. Aug 2018 — Apr 2019

    Algorythma (Swoo)

    Real-time gaming & live streaming

    • DevOps EngineerAug 2018 — Apr 2019

    First job: infrastructure for a live-streaming gaming app, where lag is the product failing.

    • Built scalable infrastructure for real-time gaming and media streaming, with Prometheus and Grafana monitoring and automated backup workflows.

🎓 B.E. Computer Science — R.V. College of Engineering, Bengaluru (2014 — 2018)

03 · Projects

Things I've built

Work projects and side projects — each one explained the way I'd explain it to a friend, not a hiring panel.

  • AI × Infrastructure · Kotak

    Helios — AI incident responder

    When a banking system breaks, Helios pulls the alerts, logs, and metrics from the ten minutes around the failure and writes the root-cause analysis itself — before an engineer has finished logging in.

    Incident investigation: hours → minutes

    • MCP
    • LLM agents
    • PagerDuty
    • OpenSearch
    • Mimir

  • AI × Security · Kotak

    AI-powered vulnerability remediation

    A dashboard that finds security vulnerabilities, files the ticket, and writes developer-specific fix instructions using Claude — replacing a quarterly report nobody read in time.

    3-month report cycles → same-day fixes

    • Prisma Cloud
    • Claude / Anthropic
    • JIRA automation

  • Platform · Kotak

    Zero-downtime service mesh migration

    Moved 7 production banking clusters off a commercial service mesh onto self-managed Istio — with regulator-grade change approval and not a second of downtime.

    ₹7 Cr/year saved · vendor independence

    • Istio
    • EKS
    • mTLS / AWS PCA
    • Kong

  • Reliability · Kotak

    Disaster recovery, rehearsed

    Automated Kubernetes failover for RBI-regulated banking workloads — recovery that is drilled, timed, and evidenced for audit, not promised on paper.

    Recovery time: 70 → 20 minutes

    • AWS
    • Multi-region
    • Terraform
    • Chaos drills

  • Side project

    AI video content engine

    A multi-agent pipeline that researches, scripts, voices, and edits faceless Hinglish YouTube videos end to end — no human in the loop after the topic is chosen.

    Fully automated channel pipeline

    • LangGraph
    • HeyGen
    • Python

  • Side project

    n8n AI workflow automations

    Client-facing AI automation workflows for enterprise use cases, on both cloud and self-hosted n8n — plus a Next.js internal hub my team at Kotak runs its operations on.

    In production for real clients & my own team

    • n8n
    • LLM APIs
    • Next.js
    • TypeScript

04 · Skills

Tools of the trade

Cloud

  • AWS (EKS, ECS, EC2, IAM, VPC)
  • GCP (GKE)
  • Hybrid cloud ↔ on-prem

Kubernetes & mesh

  • Kubernetes
  • Istio (self-managed)
  • Kong Gateway
  • Helm
  • ArgoCD

Infra as code & CI/CD

  • Terraform (modular)
  • Ansible
  • Jenkins
  • Azure DevOps
  • GitOps

Observability

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • VictoriaMetrics
  • OpenSearch
  • Mimir
  • Jaeger
  • PagerDuty

Security

  • Prisma Cloud
  • WAF (Cloudflare, Akamai)
  • mTLS (AWS PCA)
  • DevSecOps

AI & AIOps

  • LLM agents
  • MCP
  • LangGraph
  • n8n
  • Claude Code
  • Cursor

Leadership

  • Team of 8
  • CTO-level stakeholder management
  • Architecture review boards
  • Mentoring

05 · Blog

Notes from production

Real problems from real systems, written up after the pager stops.

  1. Quick read Fluent Bit is silently skipping your rotated logs A quick fix for the tail-input gotcha where fast log rotation makes Fluent Bit drop lines without a single error message. · 3 min read
  2. Deep dive Postmortem: rotating a service-mesh CA without dropping a connection A deep dive into rotating the root of trust under a production Istio mesh backed by AWS Private CA — what the docs don't tell you about workload cert propagation. · 9 min read

06 · Contact

Say hello

Hiring for a Principal, Staff, or Platform Architect role — or want to talk AI operations? Send a message; I reply within a day.