ramya@localhost~%whoami

Ramya Kailas

Lead Site Reliability Engineer · NetApp

ramya@localhost~%cat about.md

I'm a Site Reliability Engineer with 10+ years of experience building and operating secure, scalable cloud platforms.

I specialize in Kubernetes on AWS, platform engineering, observability, secrets management, and GitOps. I focus on automating operational complexity and making infrastructure reliable by design.

At NetApp, I'm extending that experience into AI-powered incident triage and intelligent monitoring to help engineers troubleshoot faster.

role
Lead Site Reliability Engineer, NetApp
location
Cary, NC
years
10+ across HPE, Red Hat, Chef Software, Fidelity
focus
Kubernetes on EKS · secrets and IAM · observability · AI tooling for SRE
ramya@localhost~%kubectl get capabilities -A
NAMESPACE: platform-engineering
Kubernetes · EKS · Helm · Kustomize · ArgoCD · Istio · GitHub Actions · Spinnaker
STATUS: Ready
NAMESPACE: infrastructure
AWS · Terraform · CloudFormation · Bicep · Crossplane · Ansible · Azure
STATUS: Ready
NAMESPACE: observability
Prometheus · Grafana · OpenTelemetry · Jaeger · CloudWatch · SLI/SLOs · Incident Response
STATUS: Healthy
NAMESPACE: security
Vault · External Secrets Operator · AWS SSM · SOPS · IRSA/OIDC · RBAC · Kyverno · OPA
STATUS: Enforced
NAMESPACE: automation
Python · Bash · Groovy · Ruby · Linux
STATUS: Running
NAMESPACE: ai-engineering
RAG Pipelines · Azure AI Search · Semantic Kernel · Ollama · LangChain
STATUS: Active
ramya@localhost~%cat experience.log

Lead Site Reliability Engineer @ NetApp · Jan 2026 – Present

  • Building an AI-powered SRE platform using Azure AI Search and hybrid retrieval to accelerate incident triage.
  • Developing intelligent ONTAP monitoring, including automated network mis-cabling detection using LLDP data.
  • Evaluating AI coding assistants for secure, enterprise-wide adoption.
  • Defining Responsible AI governance and compliance practices aligned with SOC 2 and ISO 27001.

Lead Site Reliability Engineer @ Hewlett Packard Enterprise · May 2019 – Nov 2025

  • Led multi-cluster, multi-tenant Kubernetes platforms on AWS, improving resource utilization by 25%.
  • Built observability with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry; defined SLOs and led incident response.
  • Architected IAM and workload identity for 100+ microservices, enforcing least-privilege access.
  • Led migration from Vault to External Secrets Operator and AWS SSM using GitOps and Argo CD.
  • Implemented security guardrails with Kyverno and OPA/Gatekeeper.
  • Automated provisioning and CI/CD with Terraform, Helm, Kustomize, and Argo CD.
  • Mentored engineers and drove reliability improvements through postmortems and automation.

Senior Systems Engineer @ Red Hat · Apr 2017 – May 2019

  • Scaled reliability monitoring for storage, utilization, and performance metrics.
  • Implemented RBAC and identity-scoped access for monitoring platforms.

DevOps Engineer @ Evernote · Jan 2017 – Apr 2017

  • Automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration using Ansible and Puppet.
  • Improved operational visibility through monitoring and alerting.

Solutions Engineer @ Chef Software · Sep 2014 – Dec 2016

  • Automated deployment and monitoring for Hadoop ecosystem components.
  • Built continuous delivery pipelines using Chef, Jenkins, and Test Kitchen.

Senior Automation Engineer @ Fidelity Investments · Jul 2011 – Sep 2014

  • Architected deployment orchestration for an internal enterprise collaboration platform.
  • Developed Chef cookbooks and automation tooling for cloud infrastructure.
ramya@localhost~%cat education.txt

M.S., Clemson University, School of Computing · 2009 – 2011

ramya@localhost~%tree projects/
  • greenlake-secrets/

    Tooling that sets up unique credentials for each microservice, stores them in Vault, and creates a Vault role and policy scoped to that service. Secrets rotate automatically every 30 days, and none are left outside Vault.

  • vault-to-eso/

    Moved secrets from Vault to External Secrets Operator and AWS SSM, removing plaintext secret handling and making secrets Git-declared and ArgoCD-reconciled.

  • sre-ai-platform/

    Azure AI Search, Semantic Kernel, Functions, and Bicep. Indexes incidents, alerts, and runbooks with hybrid vector search for faster troubleshooting.

  • offline-sre-agent/

    HPE Hackdays 2025. A RAG assistant for Kubernetes troubleshooting built on Ollama, LangChain, and a vector store, running fully offline in air-gapped environments.

  • policy-as-code/

    Kyverno and OPA/Gatekeeper guardrails that reject over-broad RBAC and unsafe workloads at admission time, so the secure path is the default one.

ramya@localhost~%cat contact.txt
email
ramyakailas99@gmail.com
location
Cary, NC

Try: help, capabilities, experience, projects, contact