Experience Summary
- Principal Containers Specialist Solution Architect (L7) — Amazon Web Services, September 2019 – Present
- DevOps Technical Leader II (Grade 11) — Cisco Systems India, Jan 2013 – Oct 2018
- Application Engineer Tech Lead — Texas Instruments India, July 2001 – Dec 2012
Executive Summary
Technology leader operating at the intersection of the two transformations enterprises are funding today: cloud migration & modernization at scale, and becoming AI-first. Principal Solutions Architect (L7) at AWS with 20+ years' experience, trusted advisor to 500+ enterprise customers — India's largest private banks, OTT, fintech and global SI/ISV platforms.
As a business leader, I grew Application Modernization 582% over three years, landed 105% of revenue target (+34.2% YoY), and founded a partner-led delivery programme that compressed enterprise container migrations from 6–18 months to 6–10 weeks across 5 partners and 47 customers.
As a technologist, I architect GenAI inference on both NVIDIA GPU and AWS silicon (Trainium/Inferentia) — cutting GPU inference cost ~60% and time-to-first-token up to 5× — and have solved cross-region GPU scarcity as a reusable industry pattern.
As an industry voice, I shape the AWS container roadmap through 29 product feature requests and an upstream Kubernetes proposal, author 13 AWS blogs and workshops delivered 168 times across the field, speak at AWS re:Invent 2025, reach ~700 subscribers on my YouTube channel, and grew a technical community from 87 to 187 members while mentoring 12+ engineers to senior and principal level.
Technical Expertise
Certifications verifiable
- AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) — 2025
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) — 2024
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — 2020
- Kong AI Gateway Operations — verify on Credly
- Kong Gateway Operations — verify on Credly
- Kong Gateway Foundations — verify on Credly
- AWS AI-DLC Ambassador — Foundational (L100) — verify on Credly
- AWS Knowledge: AI-Driven Development Lifecycle Foundations — verify on Credly
AWS Experience — Sept 2019 – Present
AI-First Enterprise Transformation — Flagship Wins
- Anchored the cloud-native, microservices container architecture on Amazon EKS for a top India private-sector bank's three-year CRM modernization — 120M customers, 45K concurrent users, 9,400 branches, 100TB+ data, 350M+ records — a competitive win reclaiming the workload to AWS.
- Single-threaded containers authority on India's largest AWS account, a national OTT streaming platform — home of the 72M-viewer world-record streaming concurrency on Amazon EKS; authored the account-consolidation strategy proving AWS scalability at that concurrency.
- Lead EKS architect and single-threaded owner for a top India private bank's internet-banking platform — design, scale, networking and security — with a disaster-recovery strategy at near-zero RPO and ~12-minute RTO.
AI Infrastructure — GPU & AWS-Silicon Inference at Scale
- Sole author of the KV-Cache Offloading section of the flagship NVIDIA GPU GenAI-on-EKS workshop — up to 5× faster time-to-first-token, ~60% GPU-cost reduction.
→ Workshop section · companion AWS blog - Designed and built a cross-region GPU-scarcity autoscaling pattern — overflow activates only on a genuine GPU capacity signal, drains work cross-region and scales back to zero, with no job loss. Proven live, endorsed by AWS Principal GTM Compute leadership, accelerator-agnostic, extended to a national financial-markets platform for on-premises-to-AWS burst.
- Authored the complete Ray and Anyscale chapter for AWS's GenAI accelerator workshop — LLM serving and autoscaling, multi-model GPU packing, fault tolerance, batch inference, distributed fine-tuning and operations — plus the open-source KubeRay counterpart.
→ aws-samples/sample-genai-on-eks-starter-kit - Advised the Amazon EKS product-management team on GPU capacity fungibility and Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) — static versus just-in-time GPU provisioning and reservation strategy to share one GPU pool across training and inference.
- AWS silicon (Trainium/Inferentia/Neuron) depth: root-caused a severe GenAI model-loading bottleneck for a large India FSI bank — storage weight-loading, not model compilation — driving AWS's move to high-throughput shared storage; authored the Llama-model storage price/performance benchmark on AWS Neuron; surfaced a model-architecture coverage gap and a performance regression to the Neuron service team.
→ aws-neuron-sdk issue #1355
Agentic AI Platforms & Scaled AI Enablement
- Co-owner of AWS's flagship agentic-AI platform workshop on Amazon EKS — authored the managed-SaaS track from scratch (Kubernetes-native AI gateway + LLM observability + agent SDK); delivered in Singapore and London.
→ catalog.workshops.aws/k8sagenticplatform · PR #181 - Built the entire Token Economics (AI cost-governance) workshop with partners Kong and Arize — per-tenant cost attribution, budget enforcement, cost-aware routing and semantic caching — delivered in Singapore and at a European tech summit.
- Authored 9 agent-ready guidance playbooks for AWS's internal specialist AI agent and engineered the first repeatable server-side A/B evaluation harness proving a playbook measurably improves agent guidance with no regressions — recognised by the Worldwide Tech Leader for Containers.
- Shipped 7 public agent-skills (3 EKS + 4 ECS, including GPU/ML on ECS) to AWS's open agent-skills library.
→ aws-samples/sample-apex-skills: #44, #47, #94, #96, #116, #117, #118, #119 - Agentic migration-platform evaluation (Trianz Concierto): hands-on technical review of the Concierto Agentic Assess / Migrate platform — discovery, assessment and TCO to completion, landing-zone and network-migration agents, migration plans and move groups end to end — benchmarked against AWS Transform on an identical 500-VM input; delivered 36 findings framed as product feature requests, escalated by Trianz to their product team.
Business Impact & Scale
- Created and executed a three-phase Application Modernization Webinar Series — 3,500+ participants across 700+ customers.
- Led India Application Modernization to 105% of revenue target (+34.2% YoY) and +62.4% YoY pipeline growth; the 1:Many programme reached 2,000+ customers across 40+ sessions.
- Drove sustained business growth 2022→2025 — a 582% overall increase (324% in 2023, 22% in 2024, 34.2% in 2025).
- Founded the Partner Packages programme (5 SI/ISV partners, 47 customers), compressing container deployment from 6–18 months to 6–10 weeks; multi-city EKS design workshops at CSAT 4.77/5.
Containers/EKS Enablement & Field Leadership
- Creator, owner and maintainer of the AWS EKS Security Immersion Day (since 2023) — delivered 168 times across the AWS field.
→ catalog.workshops.aws/eks-security-immersionday - As APJ Lead of the Container Ambassador Program, grew the Container Technical Field Community from 87 → 187 members.
- Drove 4 published AWS case studies, including India's first EMR/Spot and first ECS/Spot.
→ Wynk Music (EMR/Spot, ~60% cost cut) · INDmoney (ECS/Spot, 50–70%) · Druva · Bharti Airtel - Founded a 6-language localization cohort (8 native-speaker reviewers across APJ/EMEA/AMER) for the Platform Engineering on EKS workshop; French content shipped for AWS Summit Paris.
→ catalog.workshops.aws/platform-engineering-on-eks - Mentored 12+ engineers to senior/principal roles; promotion assessor; founder of a specialist community cohort; 16 hiring interviews.
Enterprise Platform Advisory — Migration, Modernization & Multi-Tenancy
- Trusted advisor with 500+ enterprise customer conversations across on-premises→AWS migration, multi-cloud re-architecture, hybrid cloud, DevOps/CI-CD, GenAI and security; single-threaded containers authority across 40+ enterprise accounts.
- Competitive multi-cloud wins: led the container architecture for enterprise SaaS and AI platforms migrating from other hyperscalers onto AWS, including a multi-tenant enterprise-AI SaaS platform that achieved 30–40% lower cost per tenant while displacing the incumbent.
- Multi-tenant SaaS at extreme fleet scale: designed and validated the network and isolation architecture for a data-platform ISV scaling to 1,000+ clusters per region — custom networking with reusable address space, interconnect topology, a capacity-ceiling density model and a tenant security-group design.
- Platform fleet operations: root-caused IP-address exhaustion for a global consulting firm's multi-tenant delivery platform — a provisioning-ordering race, not a tuning problem — and delivered a validated reference configuration plus a live reproduce-and-fix proof of concept. For an XXL fintech, built fleet-management, upgrade-at-scale and async-canary guidance for a custom-hardened-AMI estate.
→ published pattern: Automating AL2023 custom hardened AMI updates for Amazon EKS managed nodes - Unblocked FSI compliance and security gates for multiple banks and fintechs — CIS-hardened, bank-grade EKS security baselines.
→ CIS Benchmark AMIs for EKS · Bottlerocket CIS validation · Pod Security Standards
Technical Innovation
- Engineered a custom Kubernetes pod scheduler that lifted a major India insurtech's EC2 Spot adoption from 23% to 46% — winning the Invent & Simplify Award (APJ); published as an AWS blog plus an upstream Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal.
→ Customizing scheduling on Amazon EKS - Re-architected a US healthcare-technology leader's event-processing platform (6B events/month) onto ECS + EC2 Spot, cutting cost 73% while supporting 10× load at 0.3× cost.
→ athenahealth QMaaS on ECS + EC2 Spot - Built a native-AWS EKS Spot↔On-Demand failover solution adopted in production by a global financial-software firm, and pioneered stateful workloads on EC2 Spot (60% savings) — contributing to a +71% YoY rise in India EC2 Spot adoption.
→ jalawala/ec2-spot-to-od-failover-solution - Customer-originated IP: non-repudiation and granular access control using EKS access entries.
→ jalawala/granular-access-controls-with-eks-access-entries
Product & Thought Leadership
- Shaped the Amazon EKS/ECS/Fargate roadmap through 29 product feature requests and upstream contributions — container security benchmarks, native Kubernetes Network Policy, a regional Amazon Managed Prometheus launch — plus a Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal.
→ karpenter #2352 · amazon-vpc-cni-k8s #3067 - Authored 13 AWS Containers/Builder blogs and 4 published case studies; published AWS Solutions Library guidance; co-created EC2 Spot Game Days.
→ Solutions Library: external SSO with Amazon EKS · source - Delivered 4 sessions at AWS re:Invent 2025 (CSAT up to 5/5); also KubeCon, AWS Summits, Tech Summits and Developer Days.
- Open source: core contributor to AWS EKS security tooling and agentic-AI evaluation frameworks.
→ aws-samples/hardeneks
Honors & Recognition
- 15 AWS awards/recognitions (2020–2026): MVP (Q3 2020), Invent & Simplify (APJ, Q1 2021), APJ Compute Summit Award, WWSO India Excellence — Customer Obsession (5×), Unified Solutions, SA Champion, Trailblazer Deal, Outstanding Service Team, Silver TFC Member — Containers (H1 2026).
Cisco Experience — Jan 2013 – Oct 2018
- Led a 5-engineer DevOps team owning the Ejabberd (Erlang/XMPP) messaging cluster — CI/CD, Salt/Ansible/Python IaC, and upgrade/rollback automation that cut downtime from 2 hours to 15 minutes.
- Architected a production Prometheus observability stack across 50+ deployments — cutting MTTR 40% for a 500K+ household streaming platform.
- Led multi-DRM implementation (Widevine, PlayReady, Cisco VGDRM) and security hardening — secure streaming to 500K+ households across set-top-box, Android and iOS.
- Designed end-to-end DRM infrastructure (broadcast head-end, security gateways, key management) as resident DRM SME across APAC.
- Containerized streaming back-office microservices on Kubernetes/OpenShift (6 months → 8 weeks) and built a "One-Click" soak/load-test framework for infrastructure supporting 10M+ daily active users.
- Automated tenant lifecycle and cost optimisation — 35% infrastructure-cost reduction at 92% utilisation.
- 9 Cisco awards.
Texas Instruments Experience — July 2001 – Dec 2012
- Led applications engineering for OMAP mobile application-processor SoCs across 6 major projects — embedded multimedia and computational photography for Motorola, LG, Google, Nokia, NEC, Dell and 50+ global partners; accelerator-based performance optimisation to 1080p30; demos at CES/MWC.
- Applications Lead (2009–2012): managed 3-engineer teams on flagship smartphone/tablet reference platforms; trained 200+ partners across Korea/India/China and established an APAC developer-network support framework for 20+ partners.
References
- Rajesh Singh — Head of App Modernization Business, Microsoft / Azure India
- Guru Balasubramaniam — Head of Customer Engineering (Digital Natives), Google Cloud India
Education
- B.E. Computer Science & Engineering, 85% — Osmania University College of Engineering (Autonomous), Hyderabad, 1997–2001. EAMCET State Rank 153; State Rank 26 (Intermediate); State Rank 12 (X standard).
Personal
- Location: Bangalore, India · Languages: English, Telugu, Hindi
Appendix — all public assets in one place
AWS blogs (13)
- Efficient image and model caching for AI/ML and generative AI on Amazon EKS
- Automating AL2023 custom hardened AMI updates for EKS managed nodes
- athenahealth QMaaS: optimizing throughput and costs with ECS & EC2 Spot
- Customizing scheduling on Amazon EKS
- Building Amazon Linux 2 CIS Benchmark AMIs for Amazon EKS
- Validating EKS-optimized Bottlerocket AMI against the CIS Benchmark
- Implementing Pod Security Standards in Amazon EKS
- Optimize cost with ECS capacity providers and EC2 Spot
- ALB + Amazon Cognito authentication for Kubernetes web apps
- Multi-environment deployments with EKS Blueprints and CDK Pipelines
- Streaming Kubernetes events in Slack
- Secure deployment strategies in Amazon EKS with Azure DevOps (AWS Builder Center)
Workshops
- AWS EKS Security Immersion Day — creator/owner, delivered 168 times
- GenAI on Amazon EKS — KV-Cache Offloading — sole author of this section
- Build & Operate Agentic AI Platforms on Amazon EKS — co-owner; authored the managed-SaaS track, Ray/Anyscale and Token Economics modules
- Platform Engineering on Amazon EKS — owner; 6-language localization cohort
Open source & upstream
- aws-samples/sample-apex-skills — 7 authored agent-skills (EKS + ECS)
- aws-samples/sample-genai-on-eks-starter-kit — agentic platform + Ray/Anyscale
- jalawala/ec2-spot-to-od-failover-solution
- jalawala/granular-access-controls-with-eks-access-entries
- aws-samples/hardeneks — contributor
- AWS Solutions Library — external SSO with Amazon EKS
- aws-neuron-sdk #1355 · karpenter #2352 · amazon-vpc-cni-k8s #3067