Saanvi Nair Senior Platform Engineer
Seattle, WA • saanvi.nair@gmail.com • +1 206-555-0142
Profile Summary
- Senior Platform Engineer with 8 years of experience building internal developer platforms for a developer tools company and an online travel company, focused on golden paths, self-service infrastructure, and multi-tenant Kubernetes.
- Hands-on with developer portals (Backstage), Kubernetes (Amazon EKS, Helm), CI/CD and GitOps (GitHub Actions, Argo CD), infrastructure as code (Terraform, Crossplane), cloud (AWS), policy and secrets (OPA Gatekeeper, HashiCorp Vault), and languages (Go, Python), with a solid grounding in Linux, networking, and API design.
- Deep experience in paved-road service templates, namespace-as-a-service tenancy, GitOps delivery, and Crossplane compositions, following platform-as-a-product practice and RFC-based design reviews to deliver a platform app teams pick because it saves them time.
- Works closely with app teams, SRE, security, and engineering managers through monthly platform office hours and an open RFC process, where teams read and comment on roadmap changes before anything ships.
- Mentors engineers on Backstage plugin development and Kubernetes multi-tenancy, runs the twice-yearly developer survey, and owns the platform standards every new service starts from.
Technical Skills
- Developer Portals & Templates:
- Backstage, Backstage Software Templates, TechDocs, Cookiecutter
- Kubernetes & Containers:
- Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, Helm, Istio, Karpenter, Docker
- CI/CD & GitOps:
- GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Bazel
- Infrastructure as Code:
- Terraform, Crossplane, AWS CDK
- Cloud Platforms:
- AWS, Amazon RDS, AWS IAM, Google Cloud
- Policy, Security & Secrets:
- OPA Gatekeeper, Kyverno, Sigstore Cosign, HashiCorp Vault, External Secrets Operator
- Languages & Observability:
- Go, Python, TypeScript, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana
Education
Work Experience
- Ran the internal developer platform as a product for 1,100 engineers, with quarterly interviews of 40 app teams, a public roadmap and an RFC for every new capability, raising the platform’s internal satisfaction score from 3.1 to 4.3 out of 5.
- Built 6 golden paths as Backstage Software Templates that create a repo, a Helm chart, a CI workflow and OpenTelemetry tracing in one step, cutting the time to stand up a production-ready service from 3 weeks to 2 hours.
- Rolled out a Backstage service catalog covering 1,900 services, each with an owner, an on-call rotation and a TechDocs page, plus scorecards for runtime versions, raising services with a named owner from 58% to 99%.
- Offered multi-tenant Amazon EKS to 120 teams as namespaces on demand, with quotas, Karpenter node autoscaling and Istio mTLS, and ran every version upgrade without a tenant change, at 99.95% control plane availability.
- Moved team-owned pipelines onto reusable GitHub Actions workflows and GitOps deploys through Argo CD, with Argo Rollouts canaries on every production release, cutting median merge-to-production time from 52 minutes to 14 minutes.
- Put Crossplane compositions for Postgres, Redis and message queues behind the portal, backed by versioned Terraform modules, so developers order a database in minutes, cutting infrastructure tickets from 310 to 45 a month.
- Made the secure setup the default with Kyverno admission policies, Sigstore Cosign image signing and secrets pulled from HashiCorp Vault by the External Secrets Operator, raising signed production images from 41% to 100%.
- Built DORA and onboarding dashboards in Grafana, added a twice-yearly developer survey and used both to choose the next platform work, bringing a new hire’s time to first production deploy from 9 days to 1 day.
- Wrote a shared Jenkins pipeline library used by 65 teams in place of copy-pasted Jenkinsfiles, cutting builds broken by CI upgrades from 30 to 2 a quarter.
- Built a Go CLI that creates short-lived test namespaces on the shared Kubernetes clusters, bringing the wait for a test environment from 4 days to 40 minutes.
- Moved 140 services onto one common Helm library chart, so a base image security patch reached every service in 2 days instead of a month.