Balaji Chandra Babu
Verified Expert in Engineering
Platform Engineer and Developer
Sunbury-on-Thames, United Kingdom
Toptal member since March 23, 2026
Balaji is a platform engineer dedicated to helping companies build reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure. He excels in designing systems—from container platforms to CI/CD pipelines to multi-cloud deployments—that empower development teams to operate confidently. Balaji focuses on reducing complexity, enabling engineers to ship faster while maintaining security and reliability. His pragmatic approach effectively addresses infrastructure challenges, ensuring efficient and secure operations.
Portfolio
Experience
- AWS IoT - 10 years
- Docker - 10 years
- CI/CD Pipelines - 10 years
- Ansible - 10 years
- Terraform - 8 years
- Python - 6 years
- Kubernetes - 6 years
- Amazon EKS - 6 years
Preferred Environment
AWS IoT, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Prometheus, Grafana, Python, Bash
The most amazing...
...thing I've created is an AWS infrastructure with Terraform and CI/CD, allowing teams to deploy automatically without infrastructure expertise.
Work Experience
Senior Platform Engineer
Atreides
- Led infrastructure automation using Ansible, Terraform, and GitHub Actions, reducing deployment time by 60%.
- Architected end-to-end provisioning pipelines for GHES, Runners, Element, Cloudflare, and Jira, replacing manual processes.
- Built observability frameworks using Prometheus and Grafana, reducing incident response time by 40%.
- Delivered secure, highly available infrastructure for defence sector clients with strict compliance requirements.
- Led AKS implementation, migrated VM workloads to Kubernetes with autoscaling, and improved resource utilization.
Senior Platform Engineer
Guidant Global
- Headed Kubernetes platform engineering across EKS and OpenShift clusters, driving GitOps adoption with ArgoCD.
- Designed self-service platform capabilities, reducing workload provisioning time from days to minutes.
- Implemented policy-as-code (PaC) using admission controllers to enforce security and compliance across namespaces.
- Reviewed and challenged Kubernetes architectural proposals, ensuring alignment with security and scalability goals.
- Built observability frameworks with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry for end-to-end visibility.
Senior DevOps Engineer
Yahoo!
- Owned AWS EKS platform engineering, managing cluster lifecycle, scaling, and reliability for production microservices.
- Implemented autoscaling strategies at the cluster and workload levels, improving reliability during peak loads.
- Designed multi-tenant Kubernetes environments with namespace isolation, RBAC, and resource quotas.
- Built GitOps-driven deployment pipelines using Terraform and automated rollouts with health checks.
- Migrated legacy workloads to containerized microservices on EKS, reducing operational costs by 25%.
DevOps Test Engineer
MIRRIAD
- Oversaw the development and deployment of automated testing frameworks, improving CI/CD pipeline efficiency.
- Established automated deployment verification tests within Jenkins pipelines to confirm successful deployments.
- Enhanced system monitoring with Datadog, resulting in quicker incident detection and improved response times.
Experience
3-tier Cloud Application Platform
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Engineering
Oxford Brookes University - Oxford, UK
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Vel Tech Engineering College - Avadi, India
Certifications
AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer - Associate
Amazon Web Services
Skills
Tools
Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS IAM, Grafana, Amazon EKS, Helm, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Logging, GitLab CI/CD
Paradigms
Automated Testing, Automation, Azure DevOps
Platforms
AWS IoT, Docker, AWS ALB, Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, Linux, Apache Kafka, AWS Lambda, OpenShift
Languages
Python, Bash
Storage
Datadog
Other
GitHub Actions, Software Engineering, CI/CD Pipelines, AWS ECS Fargate, ECS, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Prometheus, Programming, Argo CD, GitOps, OpenTelemetry, Integration Testing, RDS PostgreSQL, Monitoring, Networking, Computer Science
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