Jinna Balu

Lead SRE • Platform Engineering • DevSecOps

Hyderabad, India jinnabalu.com jinna.baalu@gmail.com GitHub LinkedIn
Jinna Balu
Value Ambassador Award — @ Wisestep, 2020 • Platform Engineering Role

Personal Profile

Lead SRE with 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems, internal platforms, and reliability practices for global engineering teams. I architect and own infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, security, and data services, with hands-on ownership from design through production operations and a default focus on identifying toil and removing it.

Selected Impact

  • Reduced AWS spend from $27K/month to $12K/month at a prior company through right-sizing, storage optimization, and infrastructure cleanup.
  • Architected a centralized logging platform for 12+ data centers processing 21M logs per hour using application appenders, Kafka, Logstash, and Elasticsearch.
  • Led a zero-downtime migration of a high-risk global traffic entry point from Oracle Dyn to Cloudflare Load Balancer, partnering with the team while driving the DNS and cutover strategy.
  • Built deep hands-on expertise in LDAP, including multi-master deployments, migrations, productized management workflows, and open-source delivery through LDAP Manager and OpenLDAP Docker.
  • Built Docker Registry UI as an open-source product with built-in Trivy image scanning for registry operations and security visibility.

Work Experience

SRE Lead • DevSecOps Architect

Aug 2022 – Present
  • Owned platform architecture for 12+ data centers running distributed services such as Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB, Solr, and ZooKeeper.
  • Owned the platform and operations behind the AI stack used by data-science and ML engineering teams — LLM gateway (LiteLLM), Langfuse tracing, vector databases — covering high availability, autoscaling, observability, guardrails and cost controls.
  • Eliminated legacy single points of failure by redesigning critical services into highly available, fault-tolerant multi-data-center systems.
  • Designed the Azure/AKS platform and migrated all Mesos/Marathon workloads to it — every application converted to Helm charts and hybrid traffic fronted by AGIC v2, routing internet traffic to both VM-hosted applications and Kubernetes services through a single ingress.
  • Standardized regional high availability with HAProxy, VRRP, and Keepalived, then led the zero-downtime migration of the global traffic entry point from Oracle Dyn to Cloudflare Load Balancer.
  • Single-handedly designed, built and operated a centralized logging system for 12+ data centers, routing application logs through local appenders to Kafka, then into central Logstash and Elasticsearch, sustaining 21M logs per hour.
  • Established infrastructure and uptime monitoring with Datadog and Uptime Kuma to improve operational visibility and incident response.
  • Automated infrastructure and service delivery with Ansible across both containerized (Docker/Podman) and host-based environments, reducing deployment friction and manual toil.
  • Introduced Bitbucket Pipelines with self-hosted Remote Runners as a modern CI/CD path and laid the groundwork for migration away from legacy Jenkins workflows.
  • Strengthened production security by adding subdomain takeover controls and enforcing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies.
  • Executed zero-downtime LDAP storage migrations (BDB to HDB to MDB), preserving data integrity and service continuity.
  • Introduced PgBouncer to take over connection pooling for a legacy PostgreSQL application, avoiding an application rewrite while hardening the database tier.
  • Built internal platform products with Amazon Q, Claude, and GitHub Copilot, including:
    • A Spring Boot and React status platform with Go-based agents for global latency and synthetic monitoring.
    • A custom LDAP Manager UI built with React, shadcn/ui, and Tailwind CSS to simplify directory operations.
  • Drove platform upgrades and infrastructure improvements that reduced operational toil and improved service reliability for globally used systems.

DevOps Manager — Wisestep

Apr 2021 – Jul 2022
  • Led platform operations across Docker Swarm, ECS, and Kubernetes for application delivery and infrastructure standardization.
  • Operated containerized Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and Redis clusters with a focus on reliability, consistency, and scaling.
  • Embedded compliance controls with AWS Audit Manager, Security Hub, and Config to support SOC2 operations.
  • Established observability-driven engineering with Elasticsearch, Beats, Logstash, and the Prometheus stack.
  • Managed platform delivery using Kanban and Scrum, keeping error budgets, toil budgets, and operational overhead under control.
  • Built and maintained a secure developer access center for internal services and operational workflows.
  • Standardized ingress and traffic management using NGINX and Caddy.
  • Automated CI/CD and infrastructure changes with Git, Jenkins, and Ansible.
  • Scaled Elasticsearch without downtime or data loss while preserving disaster recovery paths with low RTO and RPO.
  • Owned infrastructure automation, reliability, security, capacity planning, and change management with a lean team of 2.

Platform Engineer — Wisestep

Apr 2019 – Mar 2021
  • Built and operated Spring Boot microservices on AWS, packaging services with Docker and improving release consistency.
  • Automated deployments through CI/CD pipelines and structured change management practices.
  • Established application and infrastructure monitoring for earlier fault detection and healthier releases.
  • Managed distributed NoSQL and search clusters with attention to consistency, availability, and operational stability.
  • Improved platform resilience across security, performance, and reliability concerns.
  • Implemented application performance monitoring and real-user monitoring to improve visibility into customer experience.
  • Applied AWS security and cost-optimization practices to production environments while building a stable operational baseline from scratch.
  • Ran vulnerability assessments using open-source tooling and improved release readiness.
  • Partnered with product engineering on release management and feature lifecycle delivery for the Wisestep recruitment platform.
  • Acted as the primary infrastructure decision-maker at Wisestep, building the platform from the ground up without an established guide and iteratively shaping it into a stable, cost-conscious production system.

Product Development Engineer — Wisestep

Sep 2014 – Mar 2019
  • Built and supported business-critical applications across product engineering, backend workflows, and customer-facing features.
  • Translated product requirements into UI, backend, and reporting enhancements with end-to-end ownership.
  • Delivered application code, structured releases, and maintainable implementations across evolving product modules.
  • Developed reports and analytical workflows to support operational and business decision-making.
  • Contributed to unit, system, and user acceptance testing to improve release quality.
  • Applied data science techniques for real-time anomaly detection and diagnosis of high-impact production problems.

Project #3: Wisestep ATS — Full Stack Engineer

Built and operated environments for a microservices-based recruitment platform handling partner-driven hiring workflows. Owned application security with OWASP and VAPT practices, containerization with Docker Swarm, CI/CD with Jenkins and Ansible, AWS IAM and parameter security, and day-to-day operations for Elasticsearch, Cassandra, and Kafka.

HTML, CSS, AngularJS, Bootstrap, Thymeleaf, Java, Spring MVC, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Microservices, JHipster, AWS, Docker, Docker Swarm, NGINX, VAPT

Project #2: Wisestep Pulse — Full Stack Developer

Delivered a recruitment operations platform covering timesheets, contracts, and payments, with individual ownership across frontend, APIs, database design, and SQL performance tuning.

ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, C#, SQL Server 2008, AngularJS, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Gulp, Solr

Project #1: MIS — .NET Developer

Built and maintained an internal recruiting operations system with end-to-end ownership across feature delivery, release management, monitoring, troubleshooting, and IIS deployments.

ASP.NET Web Application, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, C#, AngularJS, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Gulp, Solr, SQL Server 2008