Manoj Thorayintavida

Senior DevOps, Infrastructure & Platform Engineer with 30+ years of experience building infrastructure systems, automation, and tooling that engineering and operations teams depend on.

Background spans enterprise media (A+E Global Media), global banking (Citibank N.A., Singapore), and large-scale financial data center builds (State Bank of India), supporting environments where uptime, compliance, and operational rigor are non-negotiable. Proven track record migrating on-premises workloads to AWS and Azure, leading configuration management modernization from Chef to Ansible across 1,200+ resources and designing and operating hybrid cloud infrastructure at enterprise scale. Experienced in regulated environments including financial services (Citibank, State Bank of India) with the change governance and audit discipline that high-compliance enterprises require.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect. ITIL Foundation certified.

Senior DevOps, Infrastructure & Platform Engineer - A+E Global Media

(2016-10 - 2026-08)

Built and operated the cloud and on-premises infrastructure platform for a global media company — owning platform design, enterprise deployment architecture, Kubernetes operations, IaC, CI/CD, observability, and security across AWS, Azure, and a 1,200+ node hybrid environment.

• Designed and maintained the infrastructure platform that product and engineering teams shipped on — reusable Terraform and Pulumi modules for VPC, EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS, IAM, S3, Transit Gateway, and Direct Connect; platform abstractions that let engineers provision standardized, compliant cloud environments without becoming infrastructure experts
• Built self-service provisioning workflows through modular IaC — eliminating manual toil and enabling application teams to deploy production-equivalent environments independently; treated internal platform as a product with clear ownership and lifecycle governance
• Designed GitOps/AZURE Pipeline-driven deployment automation and CI/CD pipeline integrations — staged rollouts with health-gate validation, automated rollback triggers, and version-controlled infrastructure changes; ensured every deployment was auditable and reversible
• Led migration from Chef to Ansible across 1,200+ Linux servers — converted all configuration management to idiomatic, reusable playbooks; established fleet-wide configuration baselines and drift detection that scaled reliably as the environment grew
• Leveraged AI-assisted tooling to accelerate infrastructure code generation, runbook authoring, and operational workflow design — actively promoted team adoption of AI-driven productivity improvements across the engineering function
• Architected and operated AWS deployments inside locked-down enterprise network environments — VPC configuration, security group and NACL design, IAM permissions with least-privilege enforcement, private endpoint routing, and hybrid connectivity via Direct Connect over MPLS backbone
• Redesigned AWS network from VPC peering mesh to Transit Gateway — consolidated routing across MPLS backbone between on-premises and cloud, enforcing strict traffic boundaries between workload tiers; presented architecture and outcomes to senior leadership
• Implemented AWS Network Firewall with policy-as-code enforcement — automated security boundary management across workload tiers, decoupling internet-bound traffic from internal infrastructure and eliminating manual firewall rule management
• Designed enterprise deployment architectures supporting regulated workloads: isolated VPC topologies, data residency controls, private link patterns, and IAM delegation models suitable for customer-owned cloud environments
• Managed Kubernetes cluster operations across hybrid cloud environments — cluster provisioning and upgrades, RBAC and namespace isolation, resource quotas, CNI networking, ingress controller management, PV/PVC storage with CSI integration, and workload lifecycle management
• Operated Docker container environments at scale — image lifecycle, multi-stage build pipelines, registry management, and security-hardened runtime configurations for production deployments across hybrid infrastructure
• Deployed ephemeral, isolated compute environments using Terraform and Kubernetes namespace isolation — on-demand provisioning for development, testing, and customer sandbox use cases without impacting production systems
• Deployed and owned Datadog as the primary observability platform — custom dashboards, APM monitors, alerting policies, and SLI/SLO definitions covering Kubernetes workloads, cloud services, and on-premises infrastructure; treated monitoring, alerting, and rollback capabilities as first-class parts of every system shipped, not afterthoughts
• Integrated Splunk for unified log aggregation and SIEM alerting — compliance-grade audit trail and structured forensic capability across the full infrastructure stack; essential for incident triage in distributed environments
• Participated in on-call rotations and led incident response for complex distributed infrastructure failures — triaged compute, network, storage, and Kubernetes incidents; coordinated cross-team escalations; drove blameless post-incident reviews and implemented systemic improvements to prevent recurrence
• Authored runbooks, incident playbooks, and operational documentation — reducing meantime-to-resolution and enabling engineers to respond confidently to production alerts regardless of where the failure originated
• Deployed Wiz and Qualys for continuous cloud security posture monitoring — integrated findings into automated remediation workflows; security posture treated as an operational metric, not a point-in-time audit
• Designed and enforced IAM least-privilege access controls, RBAC policies, secrets management practices, and encryption-in-transit/at-rest across all cloud environments — consistent with enterprise compliance requirements and applied with a security-minded IaC approach
• Operated consistently within ITIL-aligned Change Control frameworks — every infrastructure change is reviewed, documented, and auditable; the discipline required to navigate enterprise customer security reviews and compliance change management processes
• Managed network segmentation and isolation across multi-tenant compute environments — enforcing strict workload boundaries and access controls across shared infrastructure running workloads for different teams and applications

Solution Architect, System Engineering - A+E Television Networks

(2005-05 - 2016-10)

Senior technical leader for enterprise infrastructure supporting mission-critical broadcast and business applications — platform governance, engineering standards, compute, storage, HA clustering, monitoring, and data protection across a 24/7 production environment.

• Defined infrastructure standards and operational practices for the engineering organization — server build standards, SAN fabric governance, monitoring requirements, and change management procedures adopted as team-wide baseline
• Deployed and governed Cisco UCS 5108 blade chassis in VMware vSphere environments — HA/DRS/vMotion, VMFS/NFS datastores, VDS networking; maintained platform lifecycle and operational readiness documentation
• Owned enterprise storage governance (HP 3PAR, EMC CLARiON, HP/Brocade SAN) and data protection strategy (EMC Avamar + Data Domain) — RPO/RTO enforcement, capacity planning, and business continuity posture for mission-critical workloads
• Implemented Zenoss and Nagios monitoring platforms — established alerting standards, service health indicators, and on-call operational playbooks; built observability capability from reactive alerting toward proactive capacity and reliability management
• Supported mission-critical back-office applications including CPO/OPE, Computron, Gabriel, and WebLogic application servers — infrastructure governance for business-critical enterprise platforms

Senior Infrastructure Administrator - Citibank N.A., Singapore - Singapore

(2004-10 - 2005-05)

Operated enterprise infrastructure in a Tier-1 banking data center serving 76 countries — high-availability systems, strict Change Control governance, compliance-driven operations, and zero-tolerance reliability standards directly applicable to AT&T enterprise platform governance.

• Administered 200+ HP-UX servers for financial processing workloads — HA cluster management, access control administration, performance diagnostics, and audit-grade change documentation; direct financial enterprise operational discipline
• Operated within rigorous IT governance frameworks — every infrastructure changes reviewed, approved, and auditable before execution; the compliance discipline and operational rigor required in large enterprise platform environments

IT Analyst - Tata Consultancy Services | State Bank of India

(2002-12 - 2004-09)

Lead architect for the greenfield central data center build of India's largest bank (6,000+ branches). Responsible for server sizing, HP Superdome SD3200/SD6400 provisioning, HP XP1024 disk array commissioning, ESL9595 tape library, SAN fabric cabling and zoning, OS deployment (Ignite-UX), Oracle Data Guard replication, MC/Service Guard HA cluster configuration, and DR site design. Implemented HP Data Protector v5, Business Copy XP, and Continuous Access XP.

Delivered a fully operational, documented data center facility under regulated financial governance — end-to-end infrastructure delivery at scale.