ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL— AVAILABLE FOR HIRE

VIKAS PALAKURTHI · SRE / DEVOPS · AUSTIN, TX

I keep production boring.

Observability engineer for the platforms everyone else depends on — large-scale Elasticsearch logging, Kafka pipelines, Kubernetes fleets, and alerting that actually means something. When systems go quiet, I ship products of my own.

View running services ↓

$ ping vikas

VIKAS PALAKURTHI · SRE / DEVOPS

$ identity --verify

✓ vikas.palakurthi — human, confirmed

✓ region: austin-tx · open_to_work

$ ▍

ELASTICSEARCH·KAFKA·KUBERNETES·EKS·HELM·PROMETHEUS·GRAFANA·OPENTELEMETRY·TERRAFORM·ARGOCD·CLAUDE API·MCP·PAGERDUTY·PYTHON·GO·FASTAPI·REACT·NEXT.JS·

10y

running production infrastructure — AWS, Kubernetes, and everything observability

15 TB/day

active Elasticsearch ingestion wrangled across stg/prod clusters

2,000+

dashboards & alert rules migrated Datadog → Prometheus at Apple

visible panic events during incidents (externally, anyway)

$ whoami

Reliability engineer by trade. Founder by compulsion.

I build and run the platforms other engineers depend on: large-scale Elasticsearch logging clusters, Kafka streaming pipelines, Kubernetes fleets on EKS, and the alerting that ties it all together. Most recently I did exactly that at Apple, on contract through my own consultancy.

Off the clock I run ROR Traders, a trading-technology brand where I've designed, built, and shipped eight products solo — from a premarket options analytics engine to an AI-powered trading journal. Founding teaches you the things on-call can't: scope, shipping, and owning the entire stack.

Now looking for my next SRE / DevOps home — Austin or remote.

Off the clock: in the charts before sunrise, working through Mark Douglas's The Disciplined Trader after dark.

# spec sheet

role = "SRE / DevOps / Observability"

base = "Austin, TX"

mode = ["on-site", "hybrid", "remote"]

core_stack = ["Prometheus", "ELK", "Kafka", "K8s"]

side_quests = "ships own products"

status = "interviewing"

prod — tail -f /var/log/career.log

[08:12:04] INFO cluster status: green

[08:12:07] INFO kafka lag: 0ms · groups healthy

[08:12:11] WARN coffee level below threshold

[08:12:12] INFO auto-remediation: refill ✓

[08:12:19] INFO deploy → canary 100% healthy

[08:12:23] INFO pagerduty: suspiciously quiet

[08:12:41] EVENT hiring_signal: recruiter_view

[08:12:42] INFO available=true · austin|remote

[08:12:04] INFO cluster status: green

[08:12:07] INFO kafka lag: 0ms · groups healthy

[08:12:11] WARN coffee level below threshold

[08:12:12] INFO auto-remediation: refill ✓

[08:12:19] INFO deploy → canary 100% healthy

[08:12:23] INFO pagerduty: suspiciously quiet

[08:12:41] EVENT hiring_signal: recruiter_view

[08:12:42] INFO available=true · austin|remote

$ top -o expertise

Instrumented skills.

OBSERVABILITY & LOGGING

ElasticsearchELK StackKibanaPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryDatadog

state: battle-tested

STREAMING & EVENTS

Kafka (Confluent)RabbitMQAWS EventBridgeStreaming pipelines

state: zero lag

PLATFORM & ORCHESTRATION

KubernetesEKSHelmDockerTerraformArgoCDAWS

state: self-healing

AI & LLM AUTOMATION

Claude APIClaude CodeMCPPrompt engineeringLLM validation pipelines

state: context-aware

INCIDENT & ON-CALL

PagerDutyOpsgenieServiceNowRunbooksSLIs/SLOsPostmortems

state: calm under fire

BUILD & AUTOMATE

PythonGoBashJenkinsGitHub ActionsFastAPITypeScriptReactNext.js

state: always compiling

$ systemctl status side-projects --all

Running services.

Products I designed, built, and operate end to end — proof that I don't just keep systems alive, I build them from zero.

oifetcher

active

oifetcher — premarket view

[ ATTACH SCREENSHOT ]

Premarket options analytics. Maps open-interest walls and key levels before the bell, so traders start the day with a plan instead of a guess.

PythonFastAPIReact

tradenarrate

active

tradenarrate — journal view

[ ATTACH SCREENSHOT ]

AI-powered trading journal with behavioral coaching. It reads your trades and tells you the truth about your habits — before they get expensive.

Next.jsTypeScriptAI coaching

ror-traders

active

ror-traders — community

[ ATTACH SCREENSHOT ]

The brand that ships it all: a paid trading community with live premarket sessions, powered by a suite of eight self-built tools.

ProductCommunityContent

$ tail -f /var/log/career.log

The log so far.

2025.08 → 2026.09

INFOApple— Observability Lead · contract via Arvik Strategies

Led a team of 10 migrating enterprise telemetry from Datadog to Apple's internal Prometheus platform (MOSAIC): 1,000+ dashboards and 1,000+ alert rules with zero disruption to production monitoring. Built an LLM-driven transformation pipeline on the Claude Code API and MCP that cut manual migration effort by 70–80%, and moved every observability asset into GitOps with CI/CD-deployed dashboards, alerts, and recording rules.

2025 → now

EVENTArvik Strategies / ROR Traders— Founder

Designed, built, and shipped eight trading-technology products solo; operate a paid community with live premarket sessions. Full-stack, full-ownership, no one to page but myself.

2021.06 → 2025.08

INFOFreddie Mac— ELK / Observability Engineer (Lead)

Ran the enterprise logging and monitoring platform: migrated self-managed ELK on EKS to Elastic Cloud with zero data loss, built Prometheus federation and telemetry pipelines, defined SLIs/SLOs with error budgets, carried the on-call rotation with documented runbooks, and executed yearly cross-region DR failover exercises.

2019.06 → 2021.05

INFOT-Mobile— ELK DevOps Engineer / Kafka Admin

Administered Elasticsearch and Confluent Kafka clusters across all environments — RBAC and SSL/SASL hardening, partition rebalancing and broker operations, plus custom Prometheus exporters for consumer lag and replication health.

WARNolder entries truncated (Capital One, T-Mobile · 2016–2019) — request the full resume for complete history

$ ssh vikas@your-infrastructure

Let's keep something running together.

Austin, TX · on-site, hybrid, or remote · SRE / DevOps / Observability

Open a connection →LinkedIn ↗GitHub ↗

avg response time: < 24h · enthusiasm uptime: 100%

Vikas

— written, designed & kept online by an actual human