Praseed Naduvath

About Praseed Naduvath

Principal Platform Architect with nearly two decades of experience leading enterprise container platforms across cloud, edge, and hybrid environments. I currently lead the entire Container Platform organization, spanning platform engineering, operations, SRE practices, and vendor management, with accountability for reliability, scalability, security, and cost efficiency.I specialize in platform engineering and Kubernetes at scale, across AKS, EKS, K3s, and RKE2, with deep expertise in service mesh (Istio), multi-cluster architectures, and platform governance. I have designed and operated platforms supporting microservices, stateful workloads, COTS applications, and business-critical systems, while driving measurable improvements in SLA, stability, and operational efficiency through automation and self-service.A significant focus of my recent work has been enabling AI and GenAI workloads on Kubernetes, including NVIDIA GPU enablement, GPU sharing strategies, and adoption of NVIDIA’s software frameworks for model training and inference. I work closely with AI, MLOps, and application teams to ensure Kubernetes is a first-class platform for accelerated computing.I am a trusted technical leader and advisor, influencing platform strategy, architectural decisions, and vendor partnerships across SUSE, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the broader cloud ecosystem. Passionate about SRE-driven operations, platform-as-a-product thinking, and mentoring teams, I focus on building platforms that are not only powerful, but reliable, secure, and easy to consume at scale.

Experience

1. Principal Engineer

   PepsiCo

   Sep 2024 — Present · Hyderabad, IN

   Platform & Architecture LeadershipLed enterprise Kubernetes platform engineering across AKS, EKS, K3s, and RKE2, supporting large-scale cloud and edge workloads. Owned Rancher platform implementation, delivering production-grade environments across multiple regions and six enterprise environments. Architected and operationalized production-ready Edge Kubernetes (K3s), defining standards, HA patterns, and lifecycle management. Designed and executed Istio decentralization strategy, including architecture, automation roadmap, and team enablement.Operational Excellence & ScaleReduced AKS cluster build SLA from 2 weeks to under 4 days through automation and cross-team alignment. Achieved ~60% YoY reduction in operational tickets via self-service, automation, and reliability improvements. Drove 55% effort reduction in platform upgrades through single-click AKS + Istio upgrades, cutting upgrade cycles from 2.5 months to under a month. Maintained near-zero escalations on AKS operations despite reduced senior staffing.Governance, Security & ReliabilityLed enterprise OPA policy governance rollout. Acted as certifying authority for AKS, Istio, and add-on upgrades. Partnered with Ops teams to stabilize L2/L3 operations, strengthen SOPs, and improve observability and incident response.Cloud, Observability & AI EnablementExecuted seamless Istio migration from upstream to Rancher Istio with zero production impact. Rolled out logstash-less Elastic architecture and improved service mesh observability. Enabled Prometheus monitoring for Argo and KEDA. Led platform readiness for AI and GenAI workloads, including GPU operator enablement, GPU sharing strategies, and MLOps evaluations. Initiated development of an AI assistant to reduce L1/L2 operational toil.Thought LeadershipRepresented PepsiCo as a speaker at KubeCon 2024 & 2025 on Edge and AI platforms. Participated in AWS Hackathon and attended NVIDIA AI Summit and Azure Day, delivering internal technical sessions.

Education

• University of Calicut

  Bachelor's degree, Electronics and Computer Application

Skills

• Software Development Life Cycle (Sdlc)
• Websphere Mq
• Solution Architecture
• Datastage
• Unix
• Websphere Message Broker
• Middleware
• Requirements Analysis
• Integration
• Sql
• Xml
• Shell Scripting
• Pl/Sql