Venkata Rajesh Kumar Gajjalakonda
San Jose
Summary
Senior DevOps Engineer with deep experience building and operating large-scale Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms across on-prem and hybrid infrastructure. Proven track record driving datacenter automation, network automation, observability, and production reliability across 15 clusters and 6,000+ nodes.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
Work History
DevOps Engineer
Verizon Wireless
San Jose
10.2016 - Current
- Accelerated deployment velocity by 50% through datacenter automation and GitOps-based Kubernetes standardization with Helm and Kustomize; led OpenShift upgrades across non-production and production environments.
- Automated end-to-end datacenter provisioning using bootstrap workflows, PXE, and DHCP relay, reducing manual intervention and improving rollout consistency at scale.
- Built network automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation to provision Cumulus, Mellanox, and Pica8 switches, standardizing switch bring-up and reducing configuration drift.
- Improved Kubernetes networking reliability by leveraging MetalLB features and optimizing BGP graceful restart across production platform environments.
- Developed Bamboo pipelines to automate infrastructure build, deployment, and provisioning workflows, increasing release reliability and operational efficiency.
- Built centralized observability with Prometheus, Alertmanager, and Grafana for multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, managing 500+ daily alerts and improving production visibility.
- Reduced MTTR from hours to 15 minutes through improved alert routing, automated remediation, and disciplined incident response, RCA, and postmortem practices.
- Engineered Airflow-based operational automation for alert processing, vendor ticketing, Jira incident creation, remediation, health checks, and issue closure; cut handling time from 30 minutes to under 5 minutes per ticket.
- Drove SLO/SLA-aligned operations, disaster recovery readiness, and capacity planning across infrastructure supporting 15 clusters, 7 physical DCs, 15 logical DCs, and 6,000+ nodes.
DevOps Consultant
Formac Inc.
San Jose
04.2016 - 09.2016
- Designed and implemented secure AWS infrastructure with automated deployment and configuration management using Jenkins and Ansible, enhancing delivery consistency and minimizing manual operational effort.
- Designed automated deployment pipelines using Jenkins and Docker for efficient software delivery.
Education
M.S. - Software Engineering
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA05-2015
Bachelor of Technology - Computer Science
Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Technology
India05-2013
Skills
Platform Engineering: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, Helm, Kustomize, GitOps
Automation & CI/CD: Ansible, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Bamboo, Apache Airflow, Jinja, YAML
Observability: Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, production monitoring, alerting, incident response
Networking & Infrastructure: MetalLB, BGP, PXE, DHCP Relay, Cumulus Linux, Mellanox, Pica8, datacenter provisioning
Reliability & Operations: RCA, postmortems, SLO/SLA, disaster recovery, capacity planning, on-call support
Programming: Python, Shell
Technical Skills
AWS, Linux, Linux-KVM, Red Hat OpenShift, Hybrid Cloud, On-Prem Infrastructure, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, Ansible, Jenkins, GitLab, Perforce, Git, GitOps, Apache Airflow, StackStorm, Jinja, YAML, Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, ELK Stack, On-Call Support, RCA, Postmortems, SLO/SLA Operations, Capacity Planning, Kyverno, RBAC, SCCs, NetworkPolicies, MetalLB, BGP, Jira
Websites
Timeline
DevOps Engineer
Verizon Wireless
10.2016 - Current
DevOps Consultant
Formac Inc.
04.2016 - 09.2016
M.S. - Software Engineering
San Jose State University
Bachelor of Technology - Computer Science
Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Technology