VINESH KUMAR SIVAN
Palo Alto
Summary
An Engineer with 14+ years of experience architecting reliable, observable, and cost-efficient distributed systems at global scale. Proven track record delivering 99.97%+ availability, reducing MTTR/MTTD by more than 30%, and engineering automated failover capabilities that lowered downtime by 35%. Deep expertise in Kubernetes, COORD/Zookeeper, cloud-native observability platforms, JVM performance tuning, and large-scale incident response. Recognized for building resilient platforms, eliminating operational toil through automation, and delivering over $567K per year in infrastructure and tooling cost savings.
Overview
17
17
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Site Reliability Operations Engineer
Roblox
San Mateo, CA
03.2026 - Current
- Designing, scaling, and maintaining mission-critical infrastructure to support a global, high-concurrency platform
- Developed and implemented automation processes to enhance system efficiency and reduce downtime.
- Mentored junior engineers, providing guidance on best practices and technical skills development and postmortem process.
- Driving reliability initiatives and platform automation to enhance system observability and reduce operational toil.
- Collaborating with cross-functional engineering teams to optimize distributed systems, ensuring high availability and performance across cloud environments.
- Implementing best practices for Incident Response, Capacity planning and long term Infrastructure stability.
Member of Technical Staff
Twitter / X Corp / X.ai
05.2018 - 03.2026
- Lead reliability, observability, automation, and performance engineering for globally distributed, mission-critical systems. Drive platform modernization, incident-response maturity, and large-scale infrastructure improvements across Kubernetes, COORD, Zookeeper, and logging platforms.
- Reliability & Incident Management
- Delivered 99.97%+ availability across critical services by improving alert signal quality, refining on-call workflows, and implementing SLO-driven operational practices.
- Reduced MTTR and MTTD by more than 30% through automated diagnostics, RCA tooling, and enhanced alerting hygiene. Engineered automated failover and traffic-routing workflows that reduced production downtime by 35%.
- Led SEV0/SEV1 remediation efforts, including recovery after the PDXA datacenter fire incident, restoring Observability, COORD, and logging platforms under severe constraints.
- Improved incident-response consistency across teams through stronger remediation patterns and cross-team coordination.
- Observability Platform Modernization (Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, GitOps)
- Deployed multi-cluster Grafana via the Grafana Operator across ATLA and PDXA, establishing Production, Self-Monitoring, and Playground environments.
- Integrated Grafana with multiple VictoriaMetrics clusters, enabling unified cross-environment metrics visibility.
- Migrated Grafana to a durable MySQL backend, preventing dashboard and datasource loss during restarts.
- Built GitOps-driven dashboard provisioning (ArgoCD + Helm), eliminating drift and standardizing deployments.
- Established the foundation for replacing the legacy TwitterMon system with a Kubernetes-native observability platform.
- Logging Platform Modernization (Splunk → FluentBit + ClickHouse)
- Decommissioned the legacy Splunk stack and migrated to FluentBit + applogforwarder + ClickHouse.
- Achieved $567K+ annual cost savings while simplifying operations and reducing compute waste.
- Downsized Splunk clusters by 96% across both datacenters with no ingestion disruption.
- Executed a zero-downtime FluentBit upgrade across 60,000+ hosts, addressing security risks and improving reliability.
- Eliminated redundant ingestion sources and high-vCPU alerts/queries, improving overall efficiency.
- Kubernetes, COORD & Zookeeper Platform Reliability
- Integrated DCEvents with xctl to create automatic audit trails for deployments, rollouts, restarts, and scaling operations.
- Automated COORD and Zookeeper operations using Airflow DAGs (Rack Diversity Validation, Audubon Attribute Audit, ZK configuration validation).
- Performed rack-diversity-driven host swaps to strengthen Zookeeper quorum stability.
- Updated Kyverno policies to fix PVC detachment issues during Kubernetes node rotations for the VMStorage cluster, stabilizing rolling upgrades and preventing storage disruption.
- Automation & Platform Engineering
- Built Airflow pipelines for automated ZK audits, spare pool validation, configuration checks, and remediation workflows. Implemented Monitoring → Airflow → Mechanic auto-remediation loops to restart failing components (e.g., Configbus Daemon) automatically.
- Added dashboard-triggered webhook execution for Airflow DAGs, reducing manual intervention and accelerating mitigations. Developed Python and platform automation for diagnostics, ingestion cleanup, and deployment consistency.
- Performance, Cost, and Capacity Optimization
- Modernized critical Java services (Java 8 → Java 17/21), reducing compute/memory usage by 25% and improving latency by 20% through ZGC tuning.
- Right-sized and scaled down multiple underutilized Observability and COORD workloads, improving cluster efficiency.
- Eliminated noisy, expensive alert rules and high-vCPU Splunk reports, reducing infrastructure costs.
- Added capacity for Wilyns, AppLogForwarder, and Stratoserver ingestion pipelines to support increased load without degradation.
- Cross-Functional Leadership & Technical Influence
- Acted as a key technical leader across Observability, COORD, Kubernetes SRE, and platform engineering teams.
- Coordinated multi-team outage response, enabling rapid mitigation and stable recovery during high-severity incidents.
- Mentored engineers, elevated on-call readiness, and improved SRE practices across the organization.
Tech Lead / Assistant Manager, Cloud Infrastructure
[24]7 inc.
05.2012 - 04.2018
- Built and led a 16-member NOC team from scratch, including hiring, training, and establishing operational readiness.
- Designed and implemented the company's Incident Management framework, including SEV classification, escalation processes, runbooks, and RCA workflows.
- Improved deployment speed by 0%+ by automating provisioning and configuration workflows using Puppet.
- Developed Python automation to eliminate repetitive provisioning, configuration, and operational tasks, reducing manual workload and accelerating service delivery.
- Ensured 2/7 availability of mission-critical production systems through proactive monitoring, incident response, and cross-functional coordination.
- Collaborated with platform and application teams to standardize infrastructure practices and reduce configuration drift across environments.
Technical Support Engineer
Mahindra Satyam
01.2011 - 10.2011
- Resolved infra issues, improved response times, and supported SLA-bound operations.
Process Executive
Infosys
10.2009 - 01.2011
- Maintained production readiness through monitoring, incident support, and workflow improvements.
Education
B.Tech - Computer Science
Jawaharlal Technical University
01-2008
Skills
- Reliability Engineering
- SLOs/SLIs, Incident Response, RCA, Error Budgets
- Cloud & IaC Automation
- AWS, EC2, EKS, RDS, Lambda, Terraform, CloudFormation, IBM Cloud
- DevOps / Platforms
- Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, GitHub, MySQL, Argocd, Helm Charts
- Performance Tuning
- JVM Tuning, ZGC, Java 8 17/21, Centos7/9 Upgrades
- Latency Optimization, Capacity Efficiency
- Observability
- Grafana, Grafana Operator, Victoria Metrics, Prometheus, Splunk, FluentBit, ClickHouse
- Automation
- AWS, EC2, EKS, RDS, Lambda, Terraform, Python, Bash, Groovy, Puppet, Ansible, Airflow DAGS, CloudFormation, IBM Cloud GitOps/ArgoCD
- Data Systems
- Kafka, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Hadoop
Certification
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.
Timeline
Senior Site Reliability Operations Engineer
Roblox
03.2026 - Current
Member of Technical Staff
Twitter / X Corp / X.ai
05.2018 - 03.2026
Tech Lead / Assistant Manager, Cloud Infrastructure
[24]7 inc.
05.2012 - 04.2018
Technical Support Engineer
Mahindra Satyam
01.2011 - 10.2011
Process Executive
Infosys
10.2009 - 01.2011
B.Tech - Computer Science
Jawaharlal Technical University