About Edwin Philip
I'm a DevOps and Platform Engineering Lead who enjoys building systems that make engineering teams more effective. My experience spans 8+ years across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, delivery automation, reliability and developer tooling.
I currently lead a five-person DevOps team at HackerRank, while continuing to design, build and troubleshoot production systems myself. I value technical depth, clear ownership and the ability to explain complicated systems in a way that helps teams make good decisions.
Career at a glance
HackerRank — Lead DevOps Engineer
February 2025 – Present
I lead platform engineering priorities and mentor engineers while remaining involved in architecture, production reliability and implementation. My work covers cloud infrastructure, deployment systems, internal developer tooling, operational standards and infrastructure governance.
Selected contributions
- Platform reliability: Help operate and modernize a Kubernetes estate spanning more than 15 production and non-production clusters.
- Kron — internal DevOps assistant: Designed and delivered an AI-assisted internal support platform that helps engineers access operational knowledge and context.
- Developer productivity: Improved reusable delivery and workload-identity patterns, while helping teams adopt safer release workflows.
- Production resilience: Worked on cloud networking remediation, autoscaling behavior, observability and recovery validation.
- Platform innovation: Explored faster container-build approaches through a BuildKit/Harbor caching proof of concept, and designed Agent Launchpad, an in-progress agent-assisted developer platform. These are presented as exploration and ongoing development, not company-wide shipped products.
HackerRank — Senior DevOps Engineer
February 2021 – February 2025
I focused on building reliable, repeatable foundations for application teams.
- Reduced a Rails build-and-deployment workflow from about 45 minutes to 15 minutes by improving CI execution and cache reuse.
- Standardized GitOps and Helm-based delivery practices and improved deployment review and rollback paths.
- Introduced Kubernetes-backed developer environments using DevSpace.
- Built reusable Terraform modules for secure AWS workload identity.
- Developed monitoring and alerting with Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana and Alertmanager.
- Helped onboard and mentor engineers on infrastructure and release workflows.
Zensar Technologies — DevOps Engineer
February 2018 – February 2021
I built my foundation in CI/CD, infrastructure automation, Kubernetes and observability.
- Delivered build, test and release pipelines using Jenkins, CircleCI and Spinnaker.
- Provisioned and maintained Kubernetes environments using Terraform and kOps.
- Automated software versioning and release practices across application repositories.
- Supported monitoring, logging and security-related platform operations.
What I work on
Platforms that developers enjoy using
A strong platform should remove repetitive work without hiding important engineering decisions. I focus on reusable workflows, clear interfaces, sensible defaults and safe self-service.
Reliability as a product capability
I care about more than dashboards and uptime numbers. Good reliability work connects the user journey to measurable service health, incident learning and pragmatic architecture choices.
Technical leadership with implementation depth
I enjoy mentoring, design reviews and cross-team collaboration. I also believe platform leaders should remain close enough to production systems to validate assumptions and understand operational trade-offs.
Skills and areas of practice
| Area | Experience |
|---|---|
| Cloud | AWS, VPC networking, IAM, EC2, EKS, S3, RDS and managed services |
| Containers & orchestration | Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Karpenter, KEDA |
| Infrastructure as code | Terraform, Atlantis, reusable modules and review workflows |
| CI/CD | Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, container build systems |
| Observability | Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, Alertmanager and application monitoring |
| Engineering tools | Python, Bash, GitOps, ChatOps and internal developer platforms |
I also study GCP and GKE architecture as part of broadening my multi-cloud platform expertise; I do not present that as equivalent to long-running production ownership of GKE.
Education and certifications
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) — 2024
- Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) — 2024
- Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Computing, C-DAC — 2017–2018
- Bachelor of Engineering, Aeronautical Engineering, Park College of Engineering and Technology — 2011–2015
Recognition
At Zensar Technologies, I received an Annual Star Performer recognition and two Star Achiever awards for engineering contributions.
Outside the job title
My interest in aeronautics shaped how I think about complex systems: understand the fundamentals, respect failure modes and make decisions based on evidence. That perspective translates naturally into infrastructure and platform engineering.
Connect
This page summarizes professional experience and selected contributions. Opinions and educational content on this site are personal.