Sushma Hiremath

Senior Backend & Platform Engineer with 14+ years of experience building and scaling cloud-native, distributed systems on Kubernetes across AWS and Azure. Proven track record delivering high-volume eCommerce platforms handling millions of transactions, with deep expertise in microservices, event-driven architecture (Kafka), and platform automation (CI/CD, IaC). Focused on improving system reliability, developer productivity, and secure, scalable infrastructure.

Senior Platform Engineer & Tech Lead at VS&Co (Victoria's Secret & Co.) (2023-09 – 2026-03)

• Architected and scaled a Kubernetes-based platform supporting millions of daily eCommerce transactions, improving system reliability and deployment velocity.
• Designed and built REST and GraphQL APIs (Java, Go, Python) powering core commerce workflows, reducing latency for customer-facing applications.
• Built internal self-service platform tools and APIs, increasing developer productivity and reducing onboarding time for new services.
• Implemented event-driven architecture using Kafka to decouple services and support high-throughput order processing.
• Standardized CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Jenkins), reducing release cycle time and enabling faster, safer deployments.
• Introduced Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm), eliminating configuration drift across environments.
• Implemented observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog), improving MTTR and enabling proactive issue detection.
• Strengthened platform security with OAuth2, RBAC, and secrets management (Azure Key Vault).
• Enabled LLM/AI integrations (OpenAI, Anthropic) and Kubernetes-based ML workloads to accelerate platform innovation.
• Mentored engineers and drove platform engineering best practices across backend and SRE teams.
• Established SLO/SLI-based monitoring and alerting strategies, improving reliability and reducing incident response time.
• Built internal automation tools and developer utilities in Go/Python to streamline platform operations and reduce manual effort.

Technical Lead - Backend Engineering at Mercedes-Benz USA (via Nagarro Inc.) (2023-04 – 2023-06)

• Led architecture and delivery of cloud-native microservices for dealer sales platform used across the U.S.
• Designed low-latency APIs (Spring Boot, GraphQL) improving system responsiveness and integration performance.
• Implemented secure authentication (OAuth2, JWT) for dealer-facing applications.
• Improved observability and production stability using Datadog, Splunk, AppDynamics.

Senior Software Engineer - Platform & SRE at IBM Software Labs (2021-03 – 2023-01)

• Applied SRE methodologies to IBM Netcool and TIP enterprise platforms — defining SLOs, error budgets, and reliability standards for event processing systems operating at global scale across Linux-based data centers.
• Contributed to enterprise-scale event processing systems (Netcool/TIP) handling large-scale monitoring workloads.
• Led incident response and post-incident reviews for critical platform issues; drove systemic reliability improvements through root cause analysis and automated remediation, reducing MTTR and change failure rate.
• Led cloud migration of critical platform workloads from on-premises to Kubernetes on IBM Cloud — architecting compute, storage, and networking abstractions and establishing automation standards for the migrated environment.
• Designed multi-region health monitoring using telemetry and health signals (New Relic, Instana, PagerDuty); built intelligent alerting and automated recovery mechanisms reducing unplanned downtime.
• Automated configuration management across 50+ Linux nodes using Ansible and Bash scripting; established infrastructure automation standards improving environment consistency and deployment velocity.
• Submitted USPTO patent for a novel resource optimization technique in distributed systems (2021-2022).

Senior Software Engineer - Backend Systems at Mercedes-Benz R&D Pvt. Ltd (2016-06 – 2021-03)

• Built and owned Map Feature Services (MFS), the backend platform powering in-vehicle applications (navigation, weather, internet radio) across the Daimler global fleet, designed for high availability and low-latency data delivery to millions of vehicles.
• Led microservices architecture design and backend SDLC end-to-end: system design, API development, data modeling, code reviews, performance tuning, and production releases.
• Migrated Java microservices to Go, achieving significant improvements in throughput and memory efficiency; replatformed services from private cloud to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with service mesh (Envoy) for interservice communication.
• Built cloud-native backend solutions on Azure (AKS, APIM, App Insights, Log Analytics, AKV); designed API management patterns and implemented OAuth2 and RBAC for secure, scalable API access control.
• Optimized database performance across PostgreSQL and Redis through query tuning, indexing strategies, and caching layer design, supporting high read throughput for real-time vehicle data services.

Module Lead - Backend Engineering at Mindtree Pvt. Ltd (2011-07 – 2016-06)

• Delivered enterprise backend software solutions for global clients including KPN (Netherlands telecom) and SITA Voyager (aviation logistics), leading full SDLC from requirements through deployment.
• Built scalable backend systems using Java, Spring, Hibernate and integrated frontend components.
• Designed and built RESTful and SOAP APIs using Java EE, Spring, and Hibernate; implemented data access layers with MySQL and Oracle for high-volume transactional systems.
• Built web integrations using JavaScript, jQuery, and HTML/CSS; ensured code quality through JUnit testing, TDD practices, and structured peer review processes.

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Electronics and Electrical Engineering – SDM College of Engineering and Technology, India (2011)