Akshay Pawar

About Akshay Pawar

Cloud & Platform Engineering leader with 9+ years of experience building secure, scalable, and automated infrastructure across AWS, Azure & GCP. I specialize in Kubernetes platforms, Cloud Security, IaC (Terraform/Pulumi), GitOps, CI/CD automation, and SRE reliability practices for enterprise-grade systems.At Thoughtworks, I architect cloud platforms, drive DevSecOps adoption, and lead cross-functional teams to deliver secure, compliant, production-ready infrastructure — accelerating engineering velocity while improving resiliency, observability, and governance.I’ve led modernization programs where we: 1. Broke monolith apps into microservices & containerized them on Kubernetes 2. Implemented GitOps pipelines with ArgoCD & GitHub Actions for secure delivery 3. Designed multi-region disaster recovery & high-availability architectures 4. Built internal self-service platforms to improve developer productivity 5. Implemented full observability pipelines with Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + OpenTelemetry 6. Secured platforms with Vault, IAM, RBAC, WAF, OPA/Gatekeeper 7. Deployed Kafka event-driven platforms & API ecosystems (Apigee, Developer Portal)🧠 Areas of Strength Kubernetes & Service Mesh (EKS, AKS, GKE, Istio) Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, Terragrunt) GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux) DevSecOps & Cloud Security Production-grade Observability & SRE practices Cloud cost optimization & governance Leading engineering teams & mentoring talentI love building reliable systems, developer platforms, and automation that scales.Open to cloud architecture, platform engineering, and senior DevOps leadership roles.

Experience

1. Senior Consultant

   Thoughtworks

   Sep 2022 — Present

   Designed and managed Kubernetes platforms (EKS, AKS, GKE) for enterprise workloads with multi-AZ HA & GitOps driven deliveryAutomated infra provisioning using Terraform + Terragrunt & Pulumi with security guardrailsImplemented GitHub Actions + ArgoCD release pipelines → increased deployment velocity & reduced manual opsIntegrated Istio service mesh and NGINX ingress for secure, reliable microservice communicationBuilt full observability pipeline (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, FluentBit, OTel) improving MTTR & visibilityDeveloped multi-region failover & DR strategies improving uptime resilienceDeployed both managed & self-hosted Kafka for event-driven architectureImplemented GCP Apigee API gateway with OAuth, traffic throttling & secure lifecycleBuilt a Drupal-based developer portal, improving onboarding, access mgmt, and documentation experienceIntroduced AI-powered automation workflows for Terraform, runbooks & incident analysis, reducing troubleshooting time & onboarding effortStandardised platform patterns (reference IaC modules, GitOps blueprints, security templates) enabling faster & compliant environment spinsMentored engineers, established DevSecOps standards, and led delivery across multiple squads

Education

• University of Mumbai

  Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Electronics and Communications Engineering

  2011 — 2016