Skip to content
Open to opportunities · Berlin or remote

Karthik Orugonda

Senior Platform Engineer & SRE

15+ years in IT, including 10+ years building and operating cloud-native platforms — primarily AWS, with Azure and GCP experience — where observability and reliability are the foundation, not an afterthought: SLOs, incident response, and golden-signal dashboards cutting MTTR by ~30%.

View projectsDownload CV
10+
Years cloud native
400+
Engineers served
~30%
MTTR reduction

Tech Skills

The stack I build platforms with

Cloud Platforms

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP

Containers & Orchestration

  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Helm
  • Kustomize
  • Istio

Infrastructure as Code

  • Terraform
  • Terragrunt
  • Ansible

GitOps

  • Argo CD

CI/CD

  • Jenkins
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI

Observability & Reliability

  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Loki
  • Tempo
  • Datadog
  • Dynatrace

Security & Governance

  • OPA Gatekeeper
  • Kyverno
  • External Secrets
  • Vulnerability Scanning & Remediation

Data & Messaging

  • SQL
  • Redis
  • RabbitMQ

Software Engineering

  • Python
  • Bash
  • Go
  • Java / Groovy

Linux & Networking

  • Linux
  • Networking
  • VPC & subnet design

AI & GPU Infrastructure

  • NVIDIA GPU Operator
  • Agentic coding workflows
  • LLM serving

Projects

What I built, and the decisions behind it

Each page documents what was chosen and what it was chosen over.

Project 01

5 documented decisions

OpenTelemetry & LGTM Platform

Telemetry ends up coupled to whichever vendor was chosen first — instrumentation is rewritten every time the backend changes, and metrics, logs and traces stay in three unconnected tools.

  • OpenTelemetry
  • LGTM Stack
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Loki
  • Tempo

Project 02

8 documented decisions

IDP & GitOps Reference Architecture

Onboarding a new service means a ticket, a wait, and a platform engineer hand-assembling the same manifests again — the platform team becomes the bottleneck for every team it serves.

  • IDP
  • GitOps
  • Argo CD
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • Go

More projects

Experience

15 years building infrastructure and the teams that run it

Platform, reliability and delivery ownership across retail, e-commerce and telecom.

  1. Dec 2022 – Present

    Current

    Senior Platform Engineer & SRE

    Aldi DX

    Reliability and observability across multiple engineering departments, on a Kubernetes internal developer platform

    • Build and own the Kubernetes internal developer platform — GitOps workflows, application CI/CD, and reusable Helm charts adopted by multiple teams across Aldi’s multi-country e-commerce.
    • Led the org-wide move from New Relic to OpenTelemetry: one standard for metrics, logs and traces, with trace-to-log correlation and sampling — cutting annual vendor licensing costs by ~40% and ending vendor lock-in.
    • Delivered GitOps-based observability with SLO-driven alerting and error budgets, plus event correlation for automated root-cause and impact analysis — reducing false-positive alerts by ~30%.
    • Built reusable Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines and governance for shared cloud infrastructure: policy-as-code, security scanning, drift detection and automated remediation.
    • Mentored platform and application engineers through design reviews and documented golden paths, so teams could adopt the platform self-service.
    • Brought agentic coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) into daily platform work, speeding up delivery of IaC modules and GitOps workflows.

    AWS ·Azure ·Kubernetes ·Terraform ·OpenTelemetry ·GitLab CI/CD ·Helm ·Docker ·Argo CD

  2. May 2018 – Nov 2022

    Technical Lead — DevOps, Cloud & Platform

    Rakuten

    Multi-tenant platform and delivery tooling for 400+ engineers

    • Led a team of 5 engineers migrating legacy platforms to a Kubernetes-based IDP on Azure and GCP — owning the architecture, platform modernisation and cost optimisation.
    • Owned capacity planning and scaling for major sales events, keeping the platform reliable through peak traffic surges.
    • Ran and evolved multi-tenant Kubernetes platforms giving 400+ engineers across multiple business domains shared compute and developer self-service.
    • Standardised CI/CD across 60+ teams: refactored Jenkins shared libraries into reusable components and introduced GitOps workflows for canary and blue-green releases, with RBAC-based team isolation.
    • Built centralised DevSecOps pipelines integrating security and code-analysis tools across the organisation.

    Hybrid / On-prem ·Azure ·GCP ·Kubernetes ·Istio ·CI/CD ·Prometheus ·Datadog ·Ansible ·Python

  3. Sep 2015 – Apr 2018

    IT Operations Lead & DevOps Engineer

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise

    Production operations for Vodafone UK's e-commerce platform

    • Led production operations for Vodafone UK’s e-commerce platform with a 25-member team — owning the incident lifecycle (detection → RCA → resolution) and driving MTTR down through post-incident improvements.
    • Built and maintained Jenkins and Puppet build-and-release pipelines for legacy monolithic applications on on-prem infrastructure.

    Production Operations ·Incident Management ·Release Engineering ·Jenkins ·Puppet

  4. Dec 2010 – Aug 2015

    Senior Software Engineer

    Tech Mahindra

    Backend and payment systems for Vodafone UK

    • Supported backend and payment-gateway systems for Vodafone UK on WebLogic and Linux, including onsite operations at Vodafone UK HQ.
    • Built automated reporting tools that cut manual effort by 40%.

    Backend Systems ·Payment Gateways ·WebLogic ·Linux

Certifications & Education

Qualifications

Certifications

  • CKA

    Certified Kubernetes Administrator

  • CKAD

    Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

Education

Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology

SVEC, affiliated to JNT University, India

Graduated 2010

Languages

  • EnglishFluent (C2)
  • GermanBeginner (A1)

Writing & Speaking

All writing

Notes from the work

3 Aug 2026 · 5 min

Time slicing or MIG: how to actually share a GPU

Two ways to run more than one workload on a GPU, and how to pick between them.

20 Jul 2026 · 5 min

Why the OpenTelemetry Collector earns its extra hop

Sending telemetry straight to your vendor is simpler. Here's what that costs you the day you want to switch.

6 Jul 2026 · 4 min

Governance gates belong in parallel, not in a chain

Lint, security and cost checks don't depend on each other. Running them one after another turns one review into several round trips.

AI Infrastructure Summit 2026 speaker listing for Karthik Orugonda

Recent talk

AI Infrastructure Summit 2026

AI Automation Café: How will AI driven automation reshape cloud infrastructure built on Terragrunt and Terraform?

29 September 2026Berlin, Germany

Recommendations

View on LinkedIn

What colleagues say

“Karthik always been a great leader with vast expertise on different set of tools and technologies. His leadership skills is one of the best I have met in corporate. His dedication to his craft is nothing short of inspiring, and his ability to coach/guide is incredible. Always helpful and brings idea for the solution to the problem in a optimal way. He's a great asset in DevOps world.”

Rohan Das

Site Reliability Engineer

Karthik was senior to Rohan, not his direct manager

“Karthik is an excellent DevOps engineer and a wonderful human being. His expertise as a DevOps engineer is considerable, and it helped our team come up with more efficient solutions on different projects. He is creative, smart, has excellent technical skills. I love his positive attitude and he is my go-to person when I need advice. I would recommend and endorse Karthik.”

Sachin Rajput

Principal Engineer, DevOps

Worked with Karthik on the same team

“During my career I've rarely come across real professionals like Karthik. I've learned so much from working with Karthik, he helped me to become a better professional. Such a great human being with vast knowledge in areas of DevOps and cloud. Highest recommendations to Karthik, not just as a thoughtful leader but as a team player as well.”

Arun Babu

DevOps Engineer

Reported to Karthik directly