BHARGAVI THOTAKURA
Austin,TX
Summary
Senior Systems Engineer / SRE with 8+ years experience in Linux operations, AWS & GCP cloud support, Kubernetes troubleshooting (pods/logs/manifests), virtualization (VMware / Oracle KVM), observability, and Terraform/Ansible automation. Reduced provisioning time by 25%, improved fleet reliability toward 99.99% uptime targets, and strengthened security across 150+ Linux servers through certificate lifecycle hardening. Strong communicator and cross-team collaborator with 24×7 on-call experience — familiar with SLAs, PCC/change control, postmortems, and RCA. Known for clear documentation and building repeatable runbooks that lower escalations and improve operational consistency.
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
Work History
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Xperi (formerly MobiTV)
11.2019 - Current
- Environment: Hybrid multi-datacenter Linux infrastructure, CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Jenkins), Terraform IaC, Oracle KVM/OLVM, Grafana/Prometheus observability.
- Drove VMware → Oracle KVM/OLVM migration for ~3,000 servers, reducing long-term platform licensing costs + future vendor dependency risk.
- Executed SSL/TLS certificate upgrades across 150+ production Linux servers, eliminating expiration-related outages and strengthening certificate compliance posture.
- Automated repeat server provisioning + config with Ansible + Bash (~25% faster) — directly shrinking deployment time & reducing manual touchpoints.
- Accelerated VM provisioning SLA by optimizing Foreman + Puppet pipelines (cut provisioning from hours → minutes), enabling faster environment readiness for Engineering + NOC teams.
- Hands-on experience installing OS on physical servers, performing hardware validation (TSR/iDRAC logs, DIMM/drive failures), and executing repeatable DC touch-ops.
- Created Prometheus/Grafana dashboards that improved issue visibility and enabled faster RCA during high-severity incidents.
- Standardized infra patterns with Terraform modules, ensuring consistent provisioning & decreasing configuration drift across environments.
- Supported Kubernetes test/lab workloads tied to GCP-aligned deployment models, validating manifests, container lifecycle behavior, and performance signals before production use.
Linux Engineer (Contract)
Google
11.2017 - 11.2019
- Environment: Linux test labs for cloud ingest validation, NFS/HDFS/Object storage test backends.
- Supported Google Transfer Appliance validation pipeline in lab + cloud environments, improving ingest reliability into Google Cloud Storage.
- Validated ingest workflows that moved multi-TB / PB-scale datasets from on-prem systems into Google Cloud Storage using Transfer Appliance tooling.
- Installed, configured, and validated Transfer Appliance software on Linux systems (Ubuntu / CentOS / RHEL) to ensure build stability before field release.
- Built NFS / HDFS / Object Storage backends to simulate enterprise customer storage sources for ingest testing.
- Automated repeat Linux configuration tasks using Ansible and integrated scripted dataset generation into Jenkins CI pipelines, reducing manual setup time.
- Performed RCA on ingest failures using logs, network traces, and system metrics — providing engineering teams with actionable defect insights.
Systems IT Engineer
BusStrut Inc.
07.2015 - 10.2017
- Environment: On-prem physical lab racks, Linux bench servers, AutoCAD electrical design workflows, Bash/Python automation checks.
- Built and maintained on-prem Linux lab benches (racks, hardware validation, connectivity), improving test cycle readiness and reducing setup time.
- Automated repetitive test checks using Bash/Python, reducing manual verification effort and improving consistency in lab results.
- Partnered with hardware + design engineering teams to validate system behavior and close defect phases faster, supported with clear documentation.
UNIX / Microfluidics MEMS System Engineer
Nanobiosym Inc.
10.2013 - 06.2015
- Environment: UNIX compute simulation servers, CAD/COMSOL modeling environments, R&D lab device validation workflows.
- Managed UNIX server upgrades, configuration, and troubleshooting for simulation workloads, ensuring stable compute environments for R&D experiments.
Education
Master of Science - Electrical & Computer Engineering
West Virginia University(WVU)
West Virginia01-2014
Bachelor of Technology - Electrical & Electronics Engineering
India
01-2011
Skills
- - Cloud: AWS (EC2, VPC, S3, IAM, CloudWatch), GCP (GKE, Compute Engine), managed 150 instances
- - Kubernetes: Production troubleshooting, Deployments, Services, StatefulSets, YAML, HPA, kubectl
- - IaC: Terraform (modules, state mgmt), Ansible (25% faster provisioning), Foreman/Puppet
- - Linux: RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu/Alma8 (8 yrs), performance tuning, networking, SSL/TLS automation
- - Automation: Python, Bash, Jenkins (CI/CD pipelines), Git, GitOps
- - Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Icinga, Dynatrace
- - Virtualization: Oracle KVM/OLVM (3000 server migration), VMware ESXi, Nomad, Consul
- - SRE: SLI/SLO/SLA, incident response, 24×7 on-call, postmortems, runbooks, change control
Timeline
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Xperi (formerly MobiTV)
11.2019 - Current
Linux Engineer (Contract)
Google
11.2017 - 11.2019
Systems IT Engineer
BusStrut Inc.
07.2015 - 10.2017
UNIX / Microfluidics MEMS System Engineer
Nanobiosym Inc.
10.2013 - 06.2015
Master of Science - Electrical & Computer Engineering
West Virginia University(WVU)
Bachelor of Technology - Electrical & Electronics Engineering
India