Saanvi Nair Platform Engineer
Seattle, WA • saanvi.nair@gmail.com • +1 206-555-0142
Profile Summary
- Platform Engineer with 7 years of experience building internal developer platforms across developer tooling, online travel, and SaaS scaleups, specializing in Backstage golden paths, Crossplane abstractions, and multi-tenant Kubernetes operations.
- Solid technical background across developer portals (Backstage), infrastructure as code (Terraform, Crossplane), container platforms (EKS, Istio), CI/CD delivery (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions), observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus), and languages (Go, Python) with strong fundamentals in policy-as-code, golden-path design, and multi-tenant reliability.
- Deep expertise in self-service infrastructure, paved-road golden paths, multi-tenant Kubernetes operation, and progressive delivery, leveraging methodologies such as platform-as-product practice and Team Topologies stream-aligned support to drive fast, safe, and self-service developer flow.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Application, SRE, and Security teams in platform-as-product environments, contributing to platform RFCs, paved-road governance, and post-incident retrospectives with a user-first, ownership-first mindset.
- Emerging leader who shares technical excellence and fosters a culture of developer-experience obsession and paved-road discipline through RFC reviews and platform office hours, while leading platform-engineering guild sessions and authoring widely adopted golden-path and Crossplane composition templates.
Technical Skills
- Internal Developer Platform:
- Backstage (Software Catalog, Scaffolder, TechDocs), Port, OpsLevel, golden-path templates, platform portals
- CI/CD & Delivery:
- ArgoCD, Flux, GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, GitLab CI, progressive delivery (Argo Rollouts, Flagger), feature flags (LaunchDarkly)
- Container & Orchestration:
- Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS), Helm, Kustomize, Istio, Linkerd, Cilium, KubeVela, Karpenter
- Infrastructure as Code:
- Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane (compositions, providers), Helm, Cluster API, OpenTofu
- Observability:
- OpenTelemetry (SDK + Collector), Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, Loki, Datadog, Honeycomb, PromQL
- Security & Policy:
- OPA / Rego, Kyverno, External Secrets Operator, Trivy, SBOMs (Syft, Grype), Cosign / Sigstore
- Cloud & Platform APIs:
- AWS (EKS, IAM, EventBridge, S3), GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub), gRPC, OpenAPI, Backstage Software Catalog APIs
- Languages & SDKs:
- Go, Python, TypeScript, Bash, Kubernetes Operator SDK, Helm Charts, Rego
Education
Work Experience
- Owned the internal developer platform powering the Actions and Codespaces engineering org supporting 1,200+ engineers, leading end-to-end design across golden-path templates, service catalog, and runtime abstractions for the build, test, and deploy lifecycle of 620+ production microservices.
- Built the developer portal on Backstage with scaffolder templates for new services, self-service infra requests, and on-call onboarding flows, cutting first-merge-to-prod time for new hires from 3.4 weeks to 6 days and lifting platform NPS from 23 to 58.
- Designed reusable build, test, and deploy pipelines on GitHub Actions and ArgoCD with Argo Rollouts canary deploys, blue/green workflow templates, and LaunchDarkly feature-flag gates, cutting CI minutes per PR by 41% and onboarding 180+ services onto progressive delivery with no per-team pipeline work.
- Operated the multi-tenant Kubernetes platform across 14 production EKS clusters with Istio service mesh, applying namespace-as-tenant isolation, Cilium-based pod networking, and mesh-managed mTLS and traffic policy, sustaining 92,000 daily pod starts at 99.97% cluster availability across the past 6 quarters.
- Built the self-service infrastructure modules with Terraform and Crossplane exposed as Backstage scaffolder templates, covering Postgres and Redis blueprints, EKS namespace and IAM bindings, and S3 buckets and EventBridge buses, letting product teams self-serve 95% of infra requests and cutting platform ticket volume by 62%.
- Standardized standardized observability across the org with OpenTelemetry SDK auto-instrumentation, Prometheus + Grafana dashboards, and Tempo and Loki log/trace correlation, lifting traced-service coverage from 38% to 91% and saving downstream teams an estimated 12 engineer-weeks/quarter.
- Embedded policy-as-code guardrails on OPA with OPA Gatekeeper admission policies, Kyverno image and pod policies, and Sigstore Cosign image signing, blocking 99.1% of non-compliant deploys and clearing zero high-severity findings on the FY24 SOC 2 + SLSA-2 audits.
- Built a self-service infrastructure provisioning API on top of Terraform Cloud and AWS Service Catalog, exposing Postgres and Redis blueprints, S3 and EKS namespace bundles, and environment-scoped IAM and secrets to 340+ engineers, dropping infra-request lead time from 9 days to 4 hours.
- Re-architected the multi-tenant CI fleet onto Karpenter-backed Kubernetes with Karpenter spot autoscaling, namespace-fair CPU and memory quotas, and noisy-neighbor isolation via cgroups v2, sustaining 99.8% CI availability while cutting hourly compute spend by 51%.
- Maintained the central monorepo build system (Bazel + GitHub Actions composite actions) supporting 220+ services, lifting Bazel cache hit rate from 64% to 87% and trimming median PR feedback time from 18 minutes to 7 minutes.
- Worked closely with SRE, Security, and Application Platform partners to coordinate Backstage pilot rollout, golden-path authoring, and on-call rotation design across 80 services across 4 product domains, mentoring 3 new platform engineers through their first on-call rotations and golden-path authoring.