Utkal Gourab Dash
Verified Expert in Engineering
Cloud Architect and Developer
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Toptal member since February 24, 2023
Utkal is a staff-level cloud platform and DevOps engineer with 12+ years of experience building production-grade infrastructure across enterprise IT, consumer goods, and SaaS environments. He specializes in platform engineering and cloud-native infrastructure, utilizing technologies like Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, GitOps, and CI/CD automation. His work delivers significant outcomes, including 40% faster deployments, 50% better incident response, and 30% cost reduction.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 10 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
- Ansible - 4 years
- AWS Cloud Architecture - 4 years
- Docker - 4 years
- Terraform - 3 years
- Amazon EKS - 2 years
- GitHub Actions - 2 years
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Linux, Architecture, Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS, AWS IAM, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), Kubernetes, Google+
The most amazing...
...thing I've modernized is a 28-year-old critical app for a travel and logistics firm, migrating to RHEL 8, overhauling CI/CD, and achieving a 17%+ ROI in Q1.
Work Experience
DevOps and Cloud Consultant
IBM
- Designed HA/DR architectures with defined SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets across distributed microservices on OpenShift, maintaining 99.9%+ uptime for a revenue-critical platform.
- Deployed end-to-end observability stack using AWS-native tooling and Grafana, cutting incident response time by 50% and enabling proactive alerting across production environments.
- Implemented HashiCorp Vault for secrets management across 50+ microservices, eliminating hardcoded credentials and achieving SOC 2-aligned security compliance.
- Built a reusable Terraform IaC framework with remote state management and policy enforcement, reducing infrastructure provisioning time by 40%.
DevOps
CodeComplete, Inc
- Set up the complete IAC automation using Terraform for managing multiple environments. Integrated Gitlab and Jenkins as part of the CICD Process.
- Re-architected security best practices using strategies for data encryption at rest and transit and storing secrets in KMS.
- Used Lambda, ECS where applicable, to reduce fixed costs by the EC2s.
Senior Software Engineer
Epsilon
- Troubleshot the Matillion ETL tool, Redshift, EMR, Hadoop clusters, Kafka Queues, ELK, JupyterHub, containers, and CI/CD pipelines and helped the team triage issues more efficiently.
- Ideated product functionalities and data flow and trained team members to quickly adapt to the environment. Took the lead during the calls and in maintaining project-related documents and participated in the upgrade and delivery of the product.
- Troubleshot real-time data feeds—including forward and backward sync between HBase and Redshift via S3 as a data lake—Lambda and API Gateway-related errors, external table, and bulk load or snapshot creation functions.
- Learned about AD FS groups and their trust relationship with AWS IAM roles, Okta admin, JupyterHub access, and other SaaS-level access to various applications and client teams, including AWS WorkSpaces.
Senior Software Engineer
HCL Technologies
- Promoted to the L2 team within a short period after having a good understanding of the trade lifecycle and business flow.
- Took the lead on certain critical activities, such as setting up different accounts and charges in production and handling a few major clients.
- Oversaw releases and learned about an end-to-end deployment process and Udeploy deployment tool. Used different scheduling and monitoring tools and ITIL guidelines, ensuring all the processes were SLA compliant.
- Maintained data, kept track of minutes, and improved documentation as part of release activities. Attended outage calls, prepared root cause analysis documents, and updated standard operating procedure (SOP) and known error database (KEDB).
- Attended QA and handover calls, contacted different stakeholders for deployment approvals, sent out notifications, and helped develop communication for support roles.
- Played a key role in writing shell scripts and participated actively in team-building activities, for which I was recognized as a star performer for four years in a row.
Experience
Cloud Modernization Project
A travel, transportation, and logistics company needed to modernize a critical application that has been in use for almost 28 years. Along with my team, I designed and implemented infrastructure solutions. We did the following sub-designs:
• moved secrets in plain text from log and INI files to secure vaults and integrated them with the current set of tools, which was necessary to comply with security requirements;
• migrated old MQ and application servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL) and made configuration changes accordingly;
• moved most of the CI/CD pipelines from Jenkins to GitHub Actions and AWS DevOps pipelines;
• containerized apps using Docker and created some POCs.
The results were significant as the application became more stable, highly scalable, and secure, and the client reported a return on investment (ROI) of over 17% in the first quarter.
DevOps for an AI Startup
Used Lambda, Amazon ECS where applicable, to reduce fixed costs by the Amazon EC2s.
Platform Reliability & Observability — Consumer Goods
Additionally, I introduced automated alerting and incident runbooks, which reduced the mean time to resolution by 50%. As part of a corporate spinoff transition, I successfully migrated over 15 CI/CD pipelines with zero downtime, ensuring a smooth transition and continued operational efficiency.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Telecommunications
Biju Patnaik University of Technology - Odisha, India
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
HashiCorp Certified: Vault Associate
HashiCorp
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
HashiCorp
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, Terragrunt
Tools
Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Amazon EKS, GitHub, AWS IAM, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Fargate, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Observability Tools, Vault, Matillion ETL for Redshift, ELK (Elastic Stack), Jira, Confluence, AWS Glue, Helm
Languages
Python, SQL, Bash, GraphQL
Paradigms
DevOps, DevSecOps, Microservices, Microservices Architecture
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Azure, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Unix, Docker, OpenShift, AWS IoT, Apache Kafka
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Microsoft Entra ID, RDBMS, Redshift, Datadog, HBase, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server
Other
Architecture, Computer Science, AWS Cloud Architecture, Production Support, Troubleshooting, Cloud Architecture, System Administration, IT Support, Leadership, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), CI/CD Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), AWS Certified Solution Architect, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, Microsoft Entra, GitHub Actions, Unix Shell Scripting, Amazon RDS, Containers, AWS DevOps, Pulumi, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Monitoring, ECS, Distributed Systems, Incident Management, Distributed Team Management, ServiceNow, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Google+, Freshdesk, Amazon MSK, GitOps, Argo CD
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