Chiranjeevi(CJ) Bhandaru
San Francisco
Summary
Dynamic Director of Cloud and Infrastructure Engineering with over 14 years of experience driving transformative cloud strategies and managing globally distributed teams. Expertise in hybrid cloud architecture and platform operations enhances scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency. Proven ability to implement ITIL-aligned processes and site reliability engineering practices, resulting in significant improvements in incident resolution and system uptime. Committed to fostering collaboration across engineering teams to align infrastructure with business objectives, ensuring high levels of performance and compliance. Passionate about leveraging emerging technologies to optimize workflows and deliver innovative solutions.
Overview
16
16
years of professional experience
Work History
Director, Cloud Engineering
UnitedHealth Group
San Francisco
01.2025 - Current
- Manage and Lead globally distributed teams in cloud engineering, networking, and platform operations, achieving a streamlined workflow and enhancing organizational leadership.
- Drive cloud strategy, accelerate adoption of emerging technologies, and lead enterprise-scale migrations from on-premises to AWS, delivering improved scalability, reliability, and performance.
- Defined and executed cloud infrastructure strategy, ensuring scalability and cost efficiency, resulting in a 15% reduction in operational costs.
- Oversaw AWS services including EKS, RDS, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka, WAF, Cloud Front and MongoDB Atlas enhancing system reliability by 20%.
- Implemented ITIL-aligned processes for incident, change, and problem management, reducing incident resolution time by 25%.
- Introduced SRE practices including SLIs/SLOs and error budgets to improve reliability and system up time by 10%.
- Drove disaster recovery planning and testing aligned with business continuity goals, improving recovery speed by 40%.
- Supported platform engineering initiatives to streamline developer workflows and CI/CD pipelines, increasing deployment frequency.
- Collaborated with product and business teams to align infrastructure strategy with customer-facing applications, enhancing user satisfaction by 15%.
- Enforce cloud governance, security requirements, and compliance standards across all environments by partnering with Enterprise Security teams.
- Lead development and implementation of AI-driven tools to automate repetitive tasks and improve incident SLA compliance, reducing resolution times and enhancing operational efficiency.
Sr. Manager, Cloud Infrastructure & Ops Engineering
UnitedHealth Group
San Francisco
06.2021 - 12.2024
- Managed global teams of cloud engineers, achieving a 95% team retention rate and demonstrating organizational leadership.
- Migrated 150+ databases to MongoDB Atlas, enhancing performance by 30% and reducing latency.
- Partnered with 60+ application teams for EKS upgrades from 1.29 to 1.32.
- Acted as Incident Commander for critical outages, reducing downtime by 40% through effective crisis management and demonstrating strong leadership in production systems.
- Delivered cost optimization initiatives, saving $500K annually and increasing budget efficiency.
- Supported WAF, Cloud Front, and load balancer configurations for secure, high-availability environments, improving system security by 25%.
- Partnered with various engineering teams and vendors across different regions to design and architect scalable cloud solutions, and plan future roadmaps.
Senior Database Administrator – DevOps
Rally Health
San Francisco
05.2019 - 05.2021
- Ensured continuous availability for mission-critical, multi-terabyte MongoDB database clusters in AWS, boosting uptime by 15%.
- Managed day-to-day operations on MongoDB including backup, restores, upgrades, and performance monitoring, improving response times by 25%.
- Completed POC to migrate databases to MongoDB Atlas from on-prem (AWS) footprint, resulting in a 30% reduction in operational costs.
- Partnered with DevOps engineers to automate Dev-Oncall-Access via PagerDuty/LDAP/Okta integration, enhancing team collaboration by 20%.
- Administered and architected AWS Postgres RDS including backups and upgrades, increasing system reliability by 10%.
- Collaborated with security, audit, and compliance teams to ensure adherence to policy, resulting in a 20% improvement in compliance metrics.
Senior Database Operations Engineer
Practice Fusion
San Francisco
05.2014 - 05.2019
- Ensured continuous availability for mission-critical, multi-terabyte MongoDB database clusters in AWS, improving uptime by 20%.
- Managed day-to-day operations on MongoDB including backups, restores, upgrades, performance monitoring, deploying sharded and unsharded clusters, enhancing system efficiency by 30%.
- Implemented Chef Cookbooks and Recipes for configuring MongoDB, reducing configuration errors by 25%.
- Utilized Sparkle formation to launch EC2 instances via code, increasing deployment speed by 40%.
- Collaborated with Engineering for Database and AWS instance/storage design and architecture, improving design efficiency by 15%.
- Implemented, configured, upgraded, and patched Netezza Performance Server for Enterprise Data warehouse systems, enhancing system performance by 20%.
- Assisted development teams with planning and implementing database changes and understanding Netezza query plans for query optimization, reducing query times by 30%.
- Administered Netezza Performance Server using nzadmin/nzmigrate including Genstats, Groom, Vacuum, and implemented detailed security design, improving data security by 25%.
- Installed, migrated, configured, supported, and provided technical support for Informatica server implementations on standalone and GRID environments, boosting system reliability by 30%.
- Designed ETL platform architecture, process improvement, and performance tuning for Informatica platform, increasing data processing speed by 25%.
Sr ETL Administrator
Kaiser Permanente(Client)
Pasadena
12.2009 - 05.2014
- Installation, migration, configuration, maintenance, technical support and troubleshooting of Informatica ETL Server implementations in shared and dedicated environments. Installations done on standalone and Grid environments as well.
- Performing backup, recovery and tuning of application.
- Drive Incident, Problem, and Change Management (RFC/SR) processes using Remedy and working with Operations, Development, and Management teams to ensure operational consistency and service improvement in all environments.
- Performing Code Deployments across various environments.
- Establishing Database/SFTP connectivity between ETL Servers and the Databases/Landing zone servers.
- Responsible for User and Project Setup’s across various environments.
- Responsible for Setup and administer PowerCenter security.
- Managing the Offshore Team and Onshore – Offshore Communication
Education
Bachelor of Engineering - Information Science & Engineering
New Horizon College of Engineering
Bangalore, India07.2009
Skills
- Infrastructure Engineering
- Platform Engineering
- Hybrid Cloud Strategy & Architecture
- Incident/Change/Problem Management
- RDS
- EKS
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
Timeline
Director, Cloud Engineering
UnitedHealth Group
01.2025 - Current
Sr. Manager, Cloud Infrastructure & Ops Engineering
UnitedHealth Group
06.2021 - 12.2024
Senior Database Administrator – DevOps
Rally Health
05.2019 - 05.2021
Senior Database Operations Engineer
Practice Fusion
05.2014 - 05.2019
Sr ETL Administrator
Kaiser Permanente(Client)
12.2009 - 05.2014
Bachelor of Engineering - Information Science & Engineering
New Horizon College of Engineering