Sneha Vala - Senior Cloud & Big Data Engineer - Visa

Summary

Senior Cloud and Big Data Engineer with extensive experience building and operating large-scale PaaS and cloud platforms across AWS and hybrid environments. Strong expertise in MSK, EKS, EMR, Terraform, Spark, distributed systems, Linux, security, Prometheus, and Grafana, supporting production environments spanning thousands of CPU cores, tens of terabytes of memory, and petabyte-scale data. Experienced across platform architecture, infrastructure, deployment, security, observability, reliability, and production operations, partnering with engineering and security teams to deliver scalable, reliable platforms.

Overview

3

Certifications

10

years of professional experience

Work History

Senior Cloud & Big Data Engineer

Visa

08.2017 - Current

Designed, built, and operated large-scale PaaS platforms for internal engineering and data teams, supporting thousands of CPU cores, tens of terabytes of RAM, and petabyte-scale storage.
Designed and operated AWS and hybrid cloud platforms using EKS, MSK, EC2, EMR, S3, Lambda, and SNS for containerized, distributed, streaming, and data-intensive workloads.
Built reusable Terraform IaC modules and automated infrastructure/application delivery through Git-based CI/CD and Jenkins, enabling standardized deployments, environment promotion, validation, and rollback.
Built and supported production Amazon EKS/Kubernetes environments, including multi-cluster operations, RBAC, namespaces, workload deployment, resource management, scaling, upgrades, and troubleshooting.
Developed Kubernetes platform standards for workload isolation, resource governance, and secure deployments, implementing Open Policy Agent (OPA) and policy controls to enforce secure-by-default configurations.
Architected highly available Amazon MSK/Apache Kafka platforms supporting high-throughput real-time ingestion, fault-tolerant processing, and event-driven workloads.
Built production Prometheus and Grafana observability, providing metrics, dashboards, and alerts across Kubernetes, MSK, EMR, infrastructure, and applications for performance and capacity management.
Designed and troubleshot cloud and hybrid infrastructure across TCP/IP, DNS, NAT, routing, load balancing, Linux, storage, and distributed-compute layers.
Executed zero-downtime upgrades across Kafka, Kubernetes, EMR, and Linux, while optimizing Spark, MapReduce, Hive, HDFS, and Kafka workloads for performance and reliability.
Partnered with engineering, security, and operations teams on architecture, technical trade-offs, design reviews, and mentoring.

Hadoop Engineer

Cloudwick

06.2016 - 07.2017

Built, installed, and managed production-grade Hadoop clusters from the ground up to support large-scale Big Data infrastructure expansions.
Spearheaded multiple cloud Proof of Concepts (POCs) utilizing AWS (EC2, S3), Spark, and Kafka to evaluate and test future architecture upgrades and cloud migration strategies.
Architected High Availability (HA) for all core Hadoop services and established robust security frameworks by implementing Kerberos and applying regular security patches.
Developed automated monitoring and alerting scripts for services and applications, improving system reliability and incident response times.
Executed minor and major upgrades for Hadoop distributions and Linux operating systems.

Skills

Cloud & Platform: AWS (MSK, EKS, EMR, EC2, S3, Lambda, SNS), Docker, PaaS

Infrastructure & DevOps: Terraform (IaC), Jenkins, Git, CI/CD, GitOps, Infrastructure Automation

Security & Policy: RBAC, Policy-as-Code, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Kerberos, Apache Ranger, LDAP

Observability & Operations: Prometheus, Grafana, Monitoring, Metrics, Dashboards, Alerting, Linux, Production Troubleshooting

Big Data & Distributed Systems: Kafka, Spark, Hadoop (HDFS, MapReduce, YARN), Hive, Oozie, ZooKeeper

Programming & Scripting: Python, SQL, Shell Scripting

Tools: JIRA, Eclipse

Certification

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Amazon Web Services

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science

Bachelor of Technology Electronics and Communications Engineering