Kunal Katdare
Raleigh
Summary
DevOps Engineer with 6+ years of experience building scalable cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platforms, CI/CD systems, and IaC automation. Strong focus on reliability engineering, cost optimization, and delivering high‑performance deployment pipelines. Proven record of leading cloud migrations, modernizing developer platforms, reducing operational pain, and architecting systems that support rapid growth.
Overview
6
6
years of professional experience
1
1
Certificate
Work History
DEVOPS ENGINEER
Proxima AI
New York
05.2024 - Current
- Architected resilient, high-throughput AWS infrastructure and established scalable guardrails, ensuring consistent reliability and cost efficiency across production environments.
- Developed organization-wide Terraform patterns and reusable modules, standardizing provisioning practices, and accelerating infrastructure provisioning.
- Leveraged AI-assisted tooling (Claude, Cursor) to accelerate module creation and improve overall productivity.
- Led migration to AWS IAM Identity Center (SSO), redesigning access governance, enforcing least-privilege policies, and streamlining onboarding/offboarding across cloud workloads.
- Optimized and scaled multi-node EKS platforms using Karpenter, improving scheduling efficiency and delivering notable compute cost reductions through right-sizing and automated capacity decisions.
- Engineered fully automated Kubernetes deployment workflows with Helm and hardened manifests, increasing release consistency, eliminating repetitive manual steps, and reducing deployment-related incidents.
- Provisioned, governed, and upgraded EKS clusters that powered CircleCI runner environments, enabling seamless version upgrades and maintaining continuous build capacity with zero developer-visible downtime.
- Built and standardized automated build-and-deploy pipelines across multiple teams, improving deployment reliability, accelerating delivery, and reducing production incidents through consistent workflows.
- Designed and deployed a cost-efficient observability stack using Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana, fully replacing Datadog and cutting monitoring spend while improving visibility and operational control.
- Implemented RDS Proxy to stabilize and optimize database connection pooling, eliminating connection exhaustion issues during peak load and improving application resilience under bursty traffic.
- Drove a 12% reduction in AWS organization spend through workload analysis, rightsizing initiatives, and automated storage lifecycle/tiering policies, tightening cost control without impacting performance or delivery.
- Platform & Infrastructure Architecture
SOFTWARE ENGINEER, PLATFORM
AKASA
San Francisco
12.2022 - 07.2023
- Developed internal Python libraries that reduced repeated work across engineering, increasing team efficiency by 15%.
- Implemented dynamic scaling and automated de-provisioning systems, reducing idle cloud cost by 20%.
- Designed and executed disaster-recovery automation that reduced recovery time by 50%.
- Automated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, reducing manual intervention by 40% and accelerating delivery by 30%.
- Built ETL data pipelines integrating AWS RDS and Redshift for analytics workloads.
- Participated in on-call and incident response, reducing incident downtime by 25%.
DEVOPS ENGINEER
Prudential Financial
Roseland
10.2019 - 12.2022
- Migrated large-scale legacy infrastructure from on-prem to AWS, reducing operational costs by 50% and improving performance by 30%.
- Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins and GitHub Actions; reduced deployment times by 25%.
- Designed a self-service onboarding platform using Terraform and Python to accelerate developer environment provisioning.
- Integrated Artifactory, Bitbucket, and CloudBees CI into a unified software delivery workflow.
- Implemented DevSecOps controls by integrating DAST/MAST scanning into CI pipelines.
- Deployed multi-environment AWS infrastructure using CloudFormation templates for standardized development, staging, and production.
Education
Master's Degree - Computer Science
New York University
New YorkBachelor's Degree - Computer Engineering
University of Mumbai
MumbaiSkills
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- CI/CD automation
- Disaster recovery
- Infrastructure automation
- Linux operating system
- AWS infrastructure
- Cost optimization
Certification
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
• Machine Learning Certification - Stanford University Coursera
• Machine Learning Certification - Stanford University Coursera
Timeline
DEVOPS ENGINEER
Proxima AI
05.2024 - Current
SOFTWARE ENGINEER, PLATFORM
AKASA
12.2022 - 07.2023
DEVOPS ENGINEER
Prudential Financial
10.2019 - 12.2022
Master's Degree - Computer Science
New York University
Bachelor's Degree - Computer Engineering
University of Mumbai
Technical Skills
AWS (EKS, EC2, VPC, RDS, Lambda, S3, IAM), GCP, EKS, Karpenter, Helm, Docker, Terraform (modular design), CloudFormation, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Spacelift, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, CloudWatch, Datadog, Python, Go, Bash, IAM, SSO (IAM Identity Center), API Gateway, least-privilege policies, Platform engineering, cloud architecture, K8s operations, reliability, cost optimization