Open to opportunities

Santosh Hegde

@santoshhegde

Message

I am a DevOps and Cloud engineering leader specializing in scalable, secure cloud platforms.

Netherlands

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m seeking a specialist or engineering lead role focused on cloud-native platform engineering, observability, security, cost optimization, and improving developer experience within a collaborative, forward-looking organization.

I have 12+ years designing, implementing, and operating large-scale, low-latency, secure infrastructure across AWS, Azure, on-premise, and hybrid clouds. I specialize in DevOps, DevSecOps, observability, Kubernetes, CI/CD and infrastructure automation with a strong focus on cost optimization and operational excellence.

I have delivered high-impact projects including multi-account AWS Control Tower migrations, ElasticSearch and OpenTelemetry-based observability platforms handling billions of events, and CI/CD pipelines using GitLab, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD and Terraform. My work has driven measurable outcomes such as reduced troubleshooting time, provisioning time, and significant licensing and cloud cost savings.

I lead and mentor engineering teams, build self-service platform capabilities, and standardize environments with GitOps and automation. I emphasize secure-by-design practices—implementing least-privilege IAM, vulnerability scanning, and policy enforcement—while improving developer experience through streamlined workflows and ephemeral environments.

I am open to roles as a specialist or engineering lead focused on cloud-native platform engineering, observability, security, and scalable automation. I bring a pragmatic, results-driven approach and a track record of building resilient, high-availability systems for mission-critical workloads.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Tech Lead - Observability

Current

Saxo Bank

May 2023 - Present (2 years 4 months)

Led a team of six to build Elastic-based observability platforms and launched an AI assistant that reduced troubleshooting time by 40%. Migrated clusters to ECK, halving provisioning time, cutting operational costs by 20% and saving $200,000 annually.

Kubernetes Elasticsearch OpenTelemetry Azure Helm CI CD Observability Terraform

Senior Platform Engineer

TMNL

Nov 2021 - Apr 2023 (1 year 5 months)

Architected AWS multi-account migrations to Control Tower and Account Factory for Terraform, reducing security warnings by 50% and achieving 100% IAM compliance. Implemented EC2 Image Builder and rolled out Datadog, cutting build errors 50% and support inquiries 80%.

AWS AWS Control Tower Terraform IAM EC2 Image Builder Datadog GitHub

Site Reliability Engineering Lead

ReaQta

Feb 2021 - Oct 2021 (8 months)

Led migration to EKS and Rancher and implemented GitLab/ArgoCD ephemeral environments, reducing deployment times by 60% and provisioning test infrastructure from days to minutes. Built a Loki/Prometheus/Grafana observability stack that cut support requests by 90%.

EKS Rancher ArgoCD Gitlab CI Loki Prometheus Grafana Kubernetes

DevOps/SRE Engineer

Bloomreach

Apr 2018 - Jan 2021 (2 years 9 months)

Spearheaded EMR migration and multi-region AWS automation using Terraform and Ansible, reducing execution time by 50% and manual errors by 60%, and saved over $100K annually through cost optimization. Migrated workloads to EKS and automated ECS deployments, accelerating deploys by 30% and reducing incident response time by 40%.

AWS Terraform Ansible EMR EKS CI CD Python Monitoring

Senior Integration Engineer

Tech Mahindra

May 2016 - Apr 2018 (1 year 11 months)

Improved automated deployment throughput using Ansible on OpenStack and VMware, reducing lead time to five minutes. Automated routine tasks with Python and Shell scripting, cutting manual work by 30%.

Ansible OpenStack VMWare Python Shell Scripting Automation)CI CD

Integration Engineer

Ericsson

Dec 2012 - May 2016 (3 years 5 months)

Served as SME for Ericsson Charging System nodes and Cisco routers, leading troubleshooting and root cause analysis across telecom projects in 17 African countries. Automated routine processes with Python and Shell scripting to reduce manual tasks by 30%.

Telecom Cisco Python Shell Scripting Automation)