Keerthana Dharmaraj

Keerthana Dharmaraj SR. DEVSECOPS SPECIALIST / SRE / SOLUTION A R C H I T EC T / P L AT F O R M E N G I N E E R - CAREER HIGHLIGHTS -Dubai, UAE PROFILE A passionate Cloud and DevSecOps Engineer with 9+ years of experience delivering secure, scalable, and high-performing solutions across Banking, Telecom, Media and Logistics sectors. Certified in AWS Solutions Architect, AWS DevOps Professional, CKA, and CKS, I bring hands-on expertise in cloud architecture, CI/CD automation, Kubernetes, and platform security. Known for driving innovation, improving deployment pipelines, and securing containerized workloads, I have been recognized with multiple Best Employee Awards for my impactful contributions. I thrive in roles that blend technical leadership with hands-on problem-solving to modernize infrastructure and ensure operational excellence. ▪ Designed and deployed secure, scalable cloud architectures on AWS and Azure, delivering cost-optimized solutions tailored to enterprise-grade telecom and banking environments. ▪ Led multiple Kubernetes platform rollouts on AWS EKS and Azure AKS, integrating Istio Service Mesh for service discovery, secure inter-service communication, and zero-trust architecture. ▪ Built and maintained real-time observability stacks using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and Splunk, ensuring complete visibility across hybrid cloud and on-premise systems. ▪ Developed Infrastructure as Code (IaC) libraries using Terraform and Ansible, enabling reusable and consistent provisioning across environments and automating security enforcement. ▪ Successfully implemented PCI DSS and CIS-compliant pipelines and security frameworks across workloads, embedding automated scanning using OWASP ZAP, Trivy, Snyk, SonarQube, Neuvector, Gitleaks, Fortify and Others. ▪ Directed disaster recovery planning and execution, defining RPO/RTO, setting up multi-region failover strategies, and conducting periodic DR drills to maintain operational resilience. ▪ Spearheaded cloud migration and modernization efforts, transitioning legacy monoliths to microservices and shifting workloads from on-prem to AWS, Applied secure container orchestration using OpenShift, hardened Kubernetes clusters with PodSecurityPolicies, NetworkPolicies, and Vaultbased secret injection.improving performance and agility. ▪ Built and integrated event-driven pipelines using Kafka, Airflow , and Lambda for scalable data flow and real-time processing in mission-critical systems. WORK EXPERIENCE Sr. DevSecOps Specialist DU / Dubai / Nov 2023 - Present SOCIAL LINKS LinkedIn: ▪ Led cross-functional collaboration between development, QA, and delivery teams to streamline the end-to-end CICD automation, including rollback strategy, production readiness validation, and post-regression sign-off processes. https://www.linkedin.com/in/keert hana-dharmaraj-a6a8201b1/ ▪ Championed DevSecOps initiatives by integrating and maintaining self-hosted tools within OpenShift (Jenkins, GitLab, Nexus, Fortify, SonarQube, ArgoCD, Sentry, Graylog, Prometheus, Grafana, Quay, Liquibase, Kafka, PostgreSQL), achieving an estimated annual cost saving of over $300K compared to equivalent SaaS platforms. SKILLS ▪ Enabled secure-by-default CI/CD workflows , embedding SAST, DAST, GitLeaks, and image vulnerability scanning into pipelines, improving overall code quality and reducing release risk. ✓ Cloud: AWS and Azure ▪ Developed and maintained Helm charts, managed Istio service mesh across namespaces, and automated secret management using Vault–OCP VSO sync with Argo CD. ✓ IaC Tools: Terraform, Ansible and CloudFormation ✓ Orechestration: EKS, AKS and Openshift ✓ Database: Postgres, MongoDB, SQL andOracle ✓ CICD Tools: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Gitlab, ArgoCD and Helm ✓ Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace and Sentry ✓ Operating Systems: RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux, SUSE, Ubuntu ▪ Delivered multiple customer and dealer-facing mobile/web apps with secure backend integrations, ensuring reliable telecom logic, API performance, and release traceability. ▪ Spearheaded the self-hosted observability stack— Sentry, Graylog, AppDynamics, Prometheus, and Grafana—to enable centralized logging, crash tracing, performance metrics, and alerting across environments. ▪ Automated database schema delivery using Liquibase via Jenkins, streamlining Oracle and PostgreSQL DDL/DML changes and onboarding DBs to Du DAM control with LDAP and session auditing. ▪ Supported and facilitated technical review sessions, POCs, and incident response war rooms; actively contributed to brainstorming sessions with architecture, testing, and release teams to introduce platform-level improvements and secure delivery pipelines. DevSecOps Engineer Fintech4x / Dubai / Jul 2023 - Nov 2023 ▪ Architected and maintained Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines using Terraform and AWS CloudFormation, enabling consistent, repeatable, and scalable infrastructure provisioning across multi-cloud environments. ✓ Networking: VPC, Route 53, WAF and Cloudflare ▪ Conducted technical workshops, POCs, and UAT sessions with US-based enterprise clients, translating complex business requirements into actionable technical solutions. ✓ Languages: Python, Java, ReactJs, NodeJs, Nextjs, ReactNative, Js, Shell Script and Bash ▪ Implemented MongoDB replica sets and PostgreSQL streaming replication with sharding for horizontal scaling and failover, improving database availability and read performance. ✓ Security: HashiCorp Vault, OWASP ZAP, GitLeaks, Fortify, SonarQube, Nessus, Veracode, Snyk, JFrong, BurpSuite, DexGuard, IxGuard, Trivy, NeuVector and Docker Scout ✓ Distributed Systems: Kafka, Graylog, Kibana and Hadoop ▪ Administered and optimized Kubernetes clusters (AKS) with resource quotas, auto-scaling policies, and node pool strategies, achieving 30% reduction in infra costs and mitigating memory leak issues in containerized apps ▪ Hardened Kafka clusters with SSL/TLS encryption, Kerberos authentication, and fine-grained ACLs , ensuring data protection and secure access controls across producers and consumers. ▪ Secured Azure Event Hubs through AAD integration, RBAC policies, and encryption at rest and in transit, aligning with enterprise security frameworks and regulatory compliance requirements. DevOps Engineer DB Cart Pvt. Ltd. / India / Oct 2021 - Jul 2023 E D U C AT I O N Electronics and Communication Engineering Kings College - Anna University C E R T I F I C AT I O N S & A P P R E C I AT I O N S AWS Solution Architect (2023) Certified Kubernetes Administrator(2024) Best Employee Award at DU (2024) Best Employee SHIKAAR Award at HDFC(2019) ▪ Responsible for CICD Process using Jenkins, Gitlab and Github Actions. Integrated ArgoCD as a GitOps tool, enabling automated deployment of applications to Kubernetes clusters. ▪ Designed and integrated Active Directory (AD) with AWS IAM and Azure RBAC for group-based access control, aligning identity federation with enterprise-grade security policies. ▪ Automated routine DB operations — data archiving, cleanup scripts, and partition maintenance — using a combination of cron jobs, stored procedures, and custom Bash scripts, significantly reducing manual overhead and improving performance longevity. AWS Cloud Administrator Nice Software Deals LLC / Dubai / Jul 2020 - Aug 2021 ▪ Administered AWS cloud services, optimizing the use of EC2, S3, RDS, EKS, and other AWS offerings to create a robust and scalable cloud infrastructure. ▪ Implemented NGINX Ingress Controller for hundreds of endpoints and migrated DNS from Route 53 to Cloudflare, enabling DDoS protection, WAF, and Zero Trust security for public-facing applications. ▪ Used Tempo in combination with Grafana dashboards to visualize trace paths, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by quickly identifying where failures or performance degradations occurred in the service flow. Used Loki to monitor and troubleshoot application logs in real-time, correlating logs with Card Validation Link: https://www.credly.com/badg es/f1d42696-6fe0-4e2c823a9d0e29b9f08b/public_url https://cp.certmetrics.com/a mazon/en/public/verify/crede ntial/FSSE2612W2FQ12KR metrics (from Prometheus) and traces (from Tempo) for a unified observability solution. Cloud Engineer HDFC Life / India / Sep 2017 - Jul 2019 ▪ Managed hybrid workloads using VMware-to-AWS migration techniques via AWS Application Migration Service and third-party tools, allowing lift-andshift strategies for legacy workloads. ▪ Defined and managed IAM roles, users, and groups, enforcing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and strong password policies across AWS accounts, enhancing access security and reducing identity-related risks. IT Engineer Guardian India Operations Pvt. Ltd. / India / Oct 2015 - Sep 2017 ▪ Performed regular system maintenance on Linux servers (RHEL, Ubuntu), including patching, package updates, and secure software installations, ensuring systems remained hardened and compliant with security baselines. ▪ I was responsible to record, manage, and resolve incidents as per the service level agreements (SLAs). Escalate unresolved issues to the appropriate internal teams.