Manu Balakrishnan Sreekumari
Site Reliability Engineer & Cloud Architect
Professional Summary
Site Reliability Engineer and Cloud Architect building and operating highly available infrastructure across AWS, Kubernetes, and hybrid VMware/cloud environments. Known for turning operational pain points into durable systems, from IAM governance models that scale across teams, to automation that has driven $500K+ in measurable savings and eliminated recurring toil. Comfortable owning problems end-to-end: designing the architecture, building the tooling, and mentoring engineers along the way. Recently expanded into AI/ML fundamentals (ZTM coursework, AWS AI Practitioner in progress) to bring that same systems thinking to AI-driven infrastructure.
Key Achievements
- Progressive experience in Site Reliability Engineering
- $200K+ annual savings through AWS SSM patching tool automation
- 30% cost reduction in development accounts through resource optimization
- 20% cost savings through EKS/ECS consolidation
- Managed infrastructure with 2000+ VMs across multiple cloud providers
- Reduced QA turnaround time from weeks to hours through containerization
- Successfully managed teams across multiple time zones (North America, Asia Pacific)
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
Validation Number: 4X7D1B1LEME4QN3P
Technical Skills
Cloud: AWS (EC2, EKS, ECS, Lambda, S3, RDS, IAM, Step Functions, EventBridge, DynamoDB, SNS/SQS, Firehose, Route 53, SSM, Transfer Family); Azure; GCP
IaC & CI/CD: Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK (working knowledge), Ansible, Packer; GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, TeamCity
Containers: Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, Rancher), Docker, containerd, Helm, Argo CD, Istio
Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, Kloudfuse, CloudWatch, Splunk, Honeycomb, PagerDuty
Virtualization: VMware vSphere/ESXi, vCloud Director, Horizon VDI, Nutanix AHV, NetApp
Databases: Oracle RAC, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL
Languages: Python, Bash, basic Go, TypeScript/Node.js (working knowledge)
Security: Akeyless, Wiz, Open Policy Agent (OPA), IAM governance
Professional Experience
Site Reliability Engineer
GE Healthcare
Toronto, ON | 05/2024 to Current
- Designed a layered IAM governance model to eliminate org-wide CI/CD runner role drift, splitting monolithic roles into version-controlled global, team, environment, and account-scoped policies with clear ownership
- Built CloudCleaner, a self-service, fully serverless AWS Nuke-based decommissioning platform (Step Functions, CodeBuild, EventBridge, DynamoDB) with GitOps config, dry-run review and approval gates, rolled out across 100+ AWS accounts to curb sandbox sprawl and reduce development spend
- Built a multi-tenant SFTP ingestion pipeline for hospital data (AWS Transfer Family, S3, Lambda-based ClamAV malware scanning, SNS/SQS fan-out) that has processed petabytes; packaged as a reusable Terraform module so new clients deploy into isolated accounts in under a day
- Consolidated duplicated per-environment CI/CD codebases across three product lines into centralized GitLab pipeline templates and versioned Terraform modules, with Wiz plan scanning and tiered approval gates for stage and prod
- Implemented telemetry pipelines into Kloudfuse: CloudWatch logs via Kinesis Firehose, Prometheus-format metric scraping, and Istio/Envoy traces through the OpenTelemetry Collector over OTLP
- Partnered with release teams to validate deployments and standardized verification runbooks across multiple time zones
- Supported reliability and operational readiness for the CareIntellect AI platform and hospital deployments through DigiHealth
Site Reliability Engineer
KAR Global
Toronto, ON | 05/2022 to 05/2024
- Built an AWS SSM-based Windows patching tool for cloud and on-premise systems, saving $200K annually
- Consolidated multiple applications onto EKS/ECS, reducing costs by ~20% year over year
- Drove Kubernetes adoption using EKS, Helm, Argo CD, and Terraform, and automated infrastructure scaling with Terraform
- Developed and maintained Azure DevOps YAML pipelines to build, test, and deploy applications across multiple environments
- Responded to PagerDuty incidents and ORCA security alerts, leading root cause analysis and remediation, and maintained an internal tool that sped up incident response
- Mentored co-op engineers on SRE best practices and fostered continuous improvement through feedback loops and iterative delivery
IT Software Engineer Principal 3
Progress Software Development Private Limited
Hyderabad, Telangana | 07/2009 to 04/2022
- Led PoC and rollout of Rancher-based Kubernetes, migrating QA databases and applications to containers and cutting environment turnaround from a week to hours
- Built VM provisioning tooling for VMware and Nutanix that supported datacenter consolidation from Hyderabad to Boston
- Migrated workloads from on-premise data centers to colocation facilities, consolidating data centers, and to AWS
- Helped evaluate AWS deployment options and migrated and deployed databases and applications to AWS
- Helped teams deploy and maintain applications and databases on multiple clouds as part of product certification
- Developed CI/CD automation with TeamCity and integrated Akeyless for centralized secrets management across pipelines and Kubernetes
- Managed VMware, Nutanix, and NetApp development infrastructure across North America and Asia Pacific, including Windows Server templates for fast, consistent provisioning
- Owned the VMware Horizon VDI environment giving developers secure access to legacy codebases, covering patching, Sysprep image builds, and performance tuning
- Deployed Oracle RAC and Microsoft SQL Server (standalone and clustered) and built customer-replica environments so Support could reproduce issues and validate fixes
- Partnered with development, QA, and product teams to design and automate on-prem and cloud dev environments, and authored user and admin guides for the vCloud Director self-service portal
- Evaluated new technologies with vendors from PoC through production, and led performance monitoring and root cause analysis to drive optimizations
Education
Bachelor of Engineering - Electronics and Communication Engineering
Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tamil Nadu, India
Diploma - Electronics and Communication Engineering
State Board of Technical Education and Training, Tamil Nadu, India