Esther Fathima Rakesh
Summary
Innovative and results-driven Reliability Engineering Manager with over 13 years of progressive experience across software development, modernization, and cloud operations. Demonstrated success in AWS migration, AI-driven automation, and SRE leadership at The Hartford. Skilled in converting legacy systems into robust, cloud-native architectures while guiding high-performing teams. Skilled in AWS, GCP, Terraform, and observability tools, with a passion for building reliable, scalable, and intelligent systems.
Overview
13
13
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Manager, Reliability Engineering
The Hartford
Connecticut
06.2025 - Current
- Managed cross-functional team of Reliability Engineers focused on maintaining secure, scalable, and robust AWS-based systems. Accountable for end-to-end cloud operations, cost optimization, and innovation initiatives driving resilience, performance, and automation.
- Drive cloud operations strategy across AWS and GCP platforms.
- Strengthen observability, resiliency, and incident response through AI-assisted automation.
- Partner with business, architecture, and DevOps teams to prioritize modernization roadmaps.
- Implement automated recovery systems reducing MTTR by 30%.
- Oversee compliance, audit readiness, and production governance for mission-critical assets.
- Champion AI integration using AWS Bedrock and GCP Vertex AI to enhance operational insights.
- Lead a multi-disciplinary team of SREs and cloud engineers through mentoring, goal setting, and technical coaching.
- Foster a continuous improvement culture emphasizing ownership, accountability, and knowledge sharing.
- Spearhead quarterly innovation sprints, encouraging engineers to prototype automation and monitoring solutions.
- Partner with leadership and HR to define career growth paths for engineers within SRE and CloudOps.
- Recognized for empowering teams through empathy-driven leadership and strong communication.
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Reliability Engineering
The Hartford
Connecticut
04.2023 - 05.2025
- Technical lead for AWS migration and cloud operations modernization.
- Designed infrastructure automation with Terraform and CloudFormation to streamline provisioning.
- Integrated Splunk ITSI, Dynatrace, and CloudWatch for unified observability.
- Implemented Bedrock-based AI models for incident prediction and alert auto-resolution.
- Collaborated across teams to embed SRE principles into CI/CD workflows.
- Drove runbook automation and incident reduction initiatives.
- Coached engineers and earned distinction as primary subject matter expert for AWS reliability patterns.
- This role will have end-to-end accountability for IT assets within a defined application portfolio, ranging from advanced digital storefronts to more traditional platforms.
Site Reliability Engineer
The Hartford
Connecticut
05.2020 - 04.2023
- This role will have end-to-end accountability for IT assets within a defined application portfolio, ranging from advanced digital storefronts to more traditional platforms.
- Drive stability and performance of the systems in application portfolio to top quartile in the industry across both production and test environments.
- Continuously improve the observability of our technology stack by evolving the usage of logs, metrics, tracing, dashboards, monitoring alerts, and integration of metrics with CI/CD pipelines.
- Independently oversee triaging and service restoration of all high-impact incidents to facilitate permanent root cause elimination and reduce service restoration time.
- Ensure transition from delivery to run (DTR) meets or exceeds all operational requirements.
- Champion the migration of applications to open source platforms and enable containerization and deployment to cloud platforms such as Openshift, AWS and Azure.
- Own and drive adoption of DevOps tools and best practices across the application portfolio.
- Ensure strict adherence to IT regulatory and compliance requirements for all applications, drive remediation of all internal, regulatory and SoX audit findings.
- Review and influence major technical design changes and participate in the review of change management activities.
- Ensure that all technical documentation and artifacts are accurately prepared, maintained and cataloged.
- Accountable for keeping the IT application currency and infrastructure metadata repositories (PlanIT and CMDB) current.
Tech Lead
Cigna
Connecticut
05.2019 - 05.2020
- Perform Level 2 Production Support (L2) activities for Cigna's Customer Service Group applications suite.
- Production problem resolution - respond to, investigate, and resolve problems with permanent countermeasures.
- On call support for all the production related problems after business hours.
- Handle project related escalations and work out resolutions of incidents, issues reported by application users using HP Service Management tool.
- Engage with Architects and Development teams as necessary to design the best solution for production problems.
- Lead investigation and resolution efforts for critical, high impact problems, defects and incidents.
- Coordinate with offshore team on production support activities and provide necessary guidance for day-to-day support using Skype and other collaboration tools.
- Provide and drive all run time improvements for all applications pre and post release.
- Perform production checkout activities after production releases, infrastructure maintenance, scheduled recycles and fix releases.
- Monitor day-to-day application performance, response time and availability.
- Interact with Enterprise Project Team and participate in their release/project meetings.
- Provide Monthly report of incidents and known root causes.
Tech Lead
The Hartford
Connecticut
01.2018 - 05.2019
- Responsible to adopt the agile/Scrum framework, prioritize enhancements and new initiatives based on dependencies and business priority.
- Based on the user requirement, design Service Oriented architecture and develop SOAP/REST API services in Java, IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender (WTX) and Data power.
- Integrate Jenkins/Udeploy component deployment into WebSphere and Data power server to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment mode.
- Guide and help offshore team to complete sprint and deliver the services to production.
- Work with Architects to deliver the security fixes.
- Provide high level estimates and plan for the applications to production move.
Developer L3
The Hartford
Connecticut
02.2017 - 12.2017
- Provide consultation and strategic recommendations to development teams by quickly assessing and remediating complex issues.
- Diagnose software problems and provide solutions/work around to ensure the highest level of availability for critical business application.
- Lead investigation and resolution efforts for critical, high impact problems, defects and incidents.
- Coordinate with developers and operations professionals to drive improvements to the deployment process and environment for delivering software.
Developer L2
The Hartford
Bangalore
10.2014 - 01.2017
- Design and Develop enterprise application service interfaces using web-based standards such as SOAP, Xpath, XSD, XSLT and XML.
- Optimize the existing Legacy system to handle web-based standards.
- Responsible for designing and developing optimized transformation logic which helps in improving the performance of all the critical applications.
- Define service contracts for SOAP/REST based services that are consumed by various business applications and user interfaces so they interact seamlessly.
- Transform complex business requirements into highly scalable technical solutions.
- Review the test plan and test strategy built by QA team and identify opportunities for test optimization.
- Responsible for designing and developing automated SOAP UI/Ready API scripts to implement continuous testing strategy.
- Responsible for setup, configure and maintain projects in Source code management systems such as GitHub and Tortoise SVN.
- Create technical design specification document and own the sign off for development/system team.
Developer L2
The Hartford
Bangalore
08.2013 - 09.2014
- To analyze various modules by understanding the requirements and raise queries.
- Involved in design activities like preparing Technical Specification Document (TSD).
- Developing program based on the specific requirements of client.
- User interface Design and development.
- Supporting User Acceptance Testing (UAT) during testing phase.
- Involved in resolution of issues faced during various phrases of testing.
- Involved in performance tuning of application.
Developer L1: Project Engineer
Nationwide Insurance
Bangalore
10.2012 - 07.2013
- Responsible for development, support, maintenance and implementation of components of a project module.
- Works on problems on relatively complex scope.
- Unit testing the modules.
- Fixing the integration defects.
Education
Master’s of Science - software engineering
Birla institute of Technology
PilaniBachelor’s - computer application
Kristu Jayanti College
BangaloreSkills
- AWS
- ECS
- Lambda
- Step Functions
- S3
- CloudWatch
- Glue
- Bedrock
- GCP
- Vertex AI
- Cloud Storage
- Terraform
- AWS CloudFormation
- Python
- Shell
- Groovy
- XSLT
- JavaScript
- Jenkins
- GitHub Actions
- AnthillPro
- UDeploy
- Splunk ITSI
- Dynatrace
- ServiceNow Integrations
- Tableau Desktop
- Sumo Logic
- GitHub
- SVN
- IBM DB2
- IMS DB
- MS SQL Server
Certification
- Google Cloud Certified – Generative AI Leader, 08/01/25
- AWS Certified AI Practitioner, 02/01/25 - 02/01/28
- AWS Certified AI Practitioner – Early Adopter, 02/01/25
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, 07/01/23 - 07/01/26
- Terraform Associate (003) – HashiCorp, 11/01/24 - 11/01/26
- Splunk IT Service Intelligence Certified, 06/01/23
- Tableau Desktop Specialist, 10/01/21
- Duck Creek Author – Basic Developer, 08/01/20
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, 11/01/20 - 11/01/23
- Sumo Logic Certified – Fundamentals, 05/01/20 - 05/01/22
- Blaze Advisor – FICO
- Adaptability & Resilience (McKinsey & Company), 12/01/23
- Problem Solving (McKinsey & Company), 02/01/24
- Business Strategy (McKinsey & Company), 04/01/24
- Management Accelerator (McKinsey & Company), 04/01/24
Timeline
Manager, Reliability Engineering
The Hartford
06.2025 - Current
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Reliability Engineering
The Hartford
04.2023 - 05.2025
Site Reliability Engineer
The Hartford
05.2020 - 04.2023
Tech Lead
Cigna
05.2019 - 05.2020
Tech Lead
The Hartford
01.2018 - 05.2019
Developer L3
The Hartford
02.2017 - 12.2017
Developer L2
The Hartford
10.2014 - 01.2017
Developer L2
The Hartford
08.2013 - 09.2014
Developer L1: Project Engineer
Nationwide Insurance
10.2012 - 07.2013
Master’s of Science - software engineering
Birla institute of Technology
Bachelor’s - computer application
Kristu Jayanti College