Pankaj is available for hire

Pankaj Gupta

Verified Expert in Project Management

Project Manager

Utrecht, Netherlands

Toptal member since February 26, 2025

Expertise

Virtual Project Management Agile Project Management Web Project Management Scrum Master Consulting Jira Project Management

Bio

Pankaj is a seasoned senior engineering manager with expertise in software development, cloud migration, data migrations, site reliability engineering (SRE), and DevOps. With a proven track record of leading cross-functional engineering teams to deliver high-quality solutions, he excels in driving cloud transformation initiatives, ensuring system reliability, optimizing performance, and overseeing seamless data migration projects. Pankaj is skilled at fostering collaboration and mentoring teams.

Project Highlights

Refactoring and Migration

Owned the refactoring and migration of an application within a year, achieving a major milestone by completing the task on schedule and reducing operational and capital costs by 50%.

Organizational SRE Practices

Increased the reliability of the software application by 50% to 70%, reduced organizational silos and toil by 70%, and enhanced the developer experience.

Expertise

Agile
Automation
CI/CD Pipelines
Cloud
Kubernetes
Project Management
Python 3
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Work Experience

Senior Engineering Manager

2022 - PRESENT

Booking.com

Joined the team as a senior engineering manager and directed global SRE, DevOps, and software development teams, driving business outcomes and delivering value.
Defined and developed SRE practices, established service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs), and migrated workloads to the cloud and Kubernetes.
Set department and team objectives, defined the department's roadmap, and made strategic decisions while balancing tactical initiatives.

Engineering Manager, SRE

2022 - 2022

Apple

Joined the team as an SRE manager and defined organizational SRE practices.
Defined and built SRE practices, including SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs for various applications. Set up observability, service health reviews, postmortem processes, capacity management, zero-downtime code deployment, incident management, and MIM processes.
Deployed SRE practices across the organization, significantly enhancing system reliability.

Principal Engineer, SRE and DevOps

2012 - 2022

Broadcom

Joined the company as an automation lead and later transitioned to an SRE architect role.
Defined and developed best practices for SRE and DevOps, implemented them across the organization, and drove key meetings, discussions, stakeholder management, and alignment building.
Reduced incidents and eliminated barriers, enhancing company efficiency and improving the developer experience.

Engineering Manager

2007 - 2012

NetApp

Joined as the first member and was tasked with building the team to address challenges related to developer experience and automation.
Defined workflows and automation, hired engineers, and built a team to implement Agile practices.
Developed workflows to integrate bugs with commits, reduced software build and release cycles, eliminated organizational silos and toil, and significantly improved overall efficiency and health while building the team from scratch.

Project History

Refactoring and Migration

Owned the refactoring and migration of an application within a year, achieving a major milestone by completing the task on schedule and reducing operational and capital costs by 50%.

I refactored an MVC application to migrate its workload from a 64GB virtual machine to containers with lower memory and CPU requirements. This involved rearchitecting key components and redesigning the application's workflow to optimize performance in a containerized environment. Additionally, I led efforts to enhance the team's expertise in containers, Kubernetes, Helm, and best practices for containerization.

Organizational SRE Practices

Increased the reliability of the software application by 50% to 70%, reduced organizational silos and toil by 70%, and enhanced the developer experience.

I defined SLIs and SLOs and collaborated with individual engineering teams to establish observability through metrics, traces, and logs. I implemented a postmortem mechanism and workflow to enhance accountability within the system. Additionally, I integrated commit tracking with Jira, enabling issue tracing during incidents. I also designed and automated development and deployment processes using SRE best practices.

DevOps and CI/CD

Managed multiple tools, including Git, Jenkins, and Sonar, integrating them into the build and release process to enable early deployment of changes to test and production environments while setting up an end-to-end workflow.

I worked across teams to align on a workflow and designed and developed it to improve the company's efficiency. This project required me to be hands-on while managing a team that did not report to me. I led cross-functional teams and collaborated at all levels.

Education

2002 - 2003

Postgraduate Degree in Information Technology

Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur - Kharagpur, India

1999 - 2002

Bachelor's Degree in Machines and Mathematics

Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak - Haryana, India

Certifications

FEBRUARY 2020 - FEBRUARY 2023

CKA: Certified Kubernetes Administrator

The Linux Foundation

DECEMBER 2019 - DECEMBER 2022

CKAD: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

The Linux Foundation

MAY 2016 - APRIL 2019

Certified AWS Solutions Architect

Amazon Web Services

JANUARY 2012 - PRESENT

Certified Scrum Professional (CSP)

Scrum Alliance

Skills

Tools

Perforce, Jira, Git, Slack, Confluence, Jenkins, Terraform, Shell

Paradigms

Management, Agile Project Management, DevOps, Agile

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Other

Project Management, Kubernetes, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), App Development, Engineering Management, Software Engineering, People Management, CI/CD Pipelines, Development, Build and Release, Automation, Reliability, REST APIs, Coaching, Cloud Migration, Team Management, Cloud, Python 3, Compensation Plans, Performance Analysis, Python, WebApp, Stakeholder Management, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), IT Infrastructure, Scrum Master, Databases, Helm, Node.js, Perl, Shell Scripting, Java, React

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