Shyam Sunder Kulkarni

About Shyam Sunder Kulkarni

I am a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, with 8 years of experience spanning platform engineering, GitOps, Kubernetes, observability, and cloud-native infrastructure. In my current role, I partner with Generative AI startups to design and scale MLOps and GenAI platforms on AWS helping customers accelerate innovation while ensuring operational excellence, resilience, and cost optimization.As a Kubernetes subject matter expert and proud Kubestronaut, I have guided organizations through modernizing application platforms, implementing GitOps-driven workflows, and adopting best practices for security, observability, and automation. My expertise is backed by 8 AWS Certifications (including Solutions Architect – Professional) and industry credentials such as Terraform Certified Associate, enabling me to advise customers with both breadth and depth across the cloud ecosystem.At AWS, I serve as a strategic technical advisor, bridging business outcomes with deep technical guidance across services like EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and AI/ML workloads. Passionate about customer success, I thrive on building long-term relationships, solving complex challenges, and helping teams extract maximum value from their AWS investments—whether they’re scaling an early-stage AI startup or operating at enterprise scale.Currently, I am deeply curious and actively learning about Agentic AI and AI infrastructure, including Amazon SageMaker, SageMaker HyperPod, Ray clusters, and Slurm-based distributed training environments exploring how these technologies can power the next generation of intelligent, autonomous systems on AWS.

Experience

1. Senior Technical Account Manager - Ai Startups

   Amazon Web Services (AWS)

   Sep 2025 — Present · Austin, TX, US

   Customer Advocacy & Strategy – Act as the primary technical liaison for Enterprise Support customers, aligning AWS best practices with business outcomes to accelerate innovation and growth.Cloud Architecture Leadership – Guide customers in architecting secure, scalable, and cost-efficient solutions using EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and SageMaker; lead Well-Architected Reviews (WARs) and Operational Reviews (ORRs).AI/ML & GenAI Platform Enablement – Partner with startups to design and optimize MLOps pipelines, LLM training, and GenAI workloads leveraging Amazon SageMaker, SageMaker HyperPod, Ray clusters, and Slurm-based distributed compute.Operational Excellence – Improve uptime, reliability, and performance through automation, observability, chaos testing, and proactive event management; lead post-incident reviews (RCAs) and drive continuous improvement.Pre-Sales & Growth Enablement – Collaborate with Account Managers and Solution Architects during pre-sales engagements to identify modernization and AI adoption opportunities, build proof-of-concepts (PoCs), and accelerate cloud migration.FinOps & Cost Optimization – Develop cost-efficiency strategies using Savings Plans, Spot Fleets, and S3 lifecycle policies; educate customers on unit economics and cost governance best practices.Security & Compliance Alignment – Support customer security teams in implementing least-privilege IAM, encryption, and governance controls; conduct Security Improvement Programs (SIP) to strengthen posture.Agentic AI & Emerging Tech Learning – Continuously explore Agentic AI, distributed AI infrastructure, and autonomous system design using AWS Bedrock, SageMaker HyperPod, Ray, and Step Functions for next-generation workloads.Collaboration & Leadership – Partner cross-functionally with AWS service teams and mentor customer engineering teams on best practices in GitOps, Kubernetes, and observability.

Education

• Visvesvaraya Technological University

  Bachelor's degree, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering

  2012 — 2016

• Florida International University

  Master of Science (M.S.), Computer Engineering

  2016 — 2018

Skills

• Software Defined Networking
• Leadership
• Team Building
• Wireshark
• Problem Solving
• C
• Microsoft Office
• Eigrp
• Idepro
• Research
• Kali Linux
• Python
• R Studio
• Gns3
• Geni
• Computer Networking
• R
• Matlab
• Creative Problem Solving
• Ollydbg
• Malware Analysis
• Ospf
• Analytical Skills
• Machine Learning
• Metasploit
• Ltspice
• Keil
• Cisco Asa