— · IST
Karthik Palani.

Senior DevOps Engineer & Platform Lead.

I build the infrastructure layer — pipelines, containers, and AI-augmented automation that lets engineering teams ship reliably and fast. Eight years across cloud architecture, SRE, IoT, embedded, and now AI agents.
Based in
Chennai, IN
Currently
ESAB India Ltd
Experience
8.7 years
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CONTENTS
  1. 01Currently
  2. 02Experience
  3. 03Work
  4. 04Stack and Tooling
  5. 05Contact
§ 01

Currently.

What I'm focused on right now.
A. Day job

Leading a full-stack & DevOps team at ESAB India, owning end-to-end infrastructure for a large-scale project.

B. AI

AI agents for code review, project management, and test orchestration.

C. Embedded

HiL (Hardware-in-the-Loop) embedded test setups and automation infrastructure.

D. Platforms

Kubernetes, container orchestration, and VM platforms — AKS and cluster-managed workloads.

E. Philosophy

I care about the compounding return of small, boring automation — the runbook that prevents a 3am page, the pipeline that makes a Friday deploy feel safe, the IaC module a new joiner can understand in 10 minutes.

§ 02

Experience.

Six roles across eight years — healthcare operations, independent cloud & DevOps consulting, SRE, DevOps, and now infrastructure leadership.
2024
— now
CURRENT
Senior DevOps Engineer
ESAB India Limited · Chennai

End-to-end infrastructure ownership for a large-scale project. Leading a full-stack & DevOps team, building HiL embedded test setups, and developing micro AI agents — MCP servers, CodeSentinel, PM-Agent, TestFlow Pro.

KubernetesHiL AutomationRAG · LLMsMCPTeam Lead
2023
— 2024
Senior DevOps Engineer
Ebot AI IT Solutions · Chennai

Cluster migrations across on-premise and cloud infrastructure. Hands-on with IaC and Ansible for provisioning + configuration. Managed full containerized dev and production environments on Kubernetes.

KubernetesAnsibleTerraformGitLab CIJenkinsMigrations
2022
— 2023
DevOps Engineer
Motherson Technology Services · Client: ESAB India

Managed AKS clusters and Azure resources end-to-end. Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines on GitLab and Jenkins, including IoT automation builds.

AKSAzureGitLab CIJenkinsIoT
2019
— 2022
SRE Engineer
Xmedia Solutions · Chennai

Full-lifecycle CRM development and deployment on Odoo — dev through production. Managed on-premise cluster infrastructure provisioning and ongoing maintenance.

2018
— 2019
DevOps & Cloud Architect
Freelance · Remote

Architected cloud infrastructure for monolith-to-microservices migrations. Built CI/CD pipelines on GitLab and Jenkins, plus Python + Pytest automation frameworks.

GitLabJenkinsPythonPytestMicroservices
2017
— 2018
HC & Insurance Ops
NTT Data Services · Chennai

Operations team member in Healthcare Process and Adjudication. First exposure to large-scale enterprise workflows and cross-functional process management.

Healthcare ITOperationsAdjudication
§ 03

Work.

Production AI agents, embedded test infrastructure, system design, and cloud architecture — shipped at ESAB India and in earlier roles.
A.001

CodeSentinel— an AI code review framework

An AI code review framework that watches every pull request: indexes the repo, runs RAG against internal patterns, flags risky changes, and enforces team standards — integrated into CI before a human gets paged for review.

RAGretrieval
Local LLMruntime
CInative
A.002

PM-Agent

AI-driven project management. Tracks tasks, surfaces blockers, and automates routine PM workflows — so the project manager can focus on actual decisions, not status pings.

local LLMstack
MCPprotocol
A.003

TestFlow Pro

End-to-end AI automation testing. Orchestrates whole test pipelines, generates and adapts test cases from intent, and ships results back into CI in a form humans can read.

E2Eautomation
AI-nativetest gen
A.004

HiL Test Infrastructure

Hardware-in-the-Loop embedded test automation — CI-integrated, reproducible, runs on bare metal. Built for the firmware team to stop fearing the merge button.

HiLembedded
CIintegrated
A.005

System Design

End-to-end platform architecture — Kubernetes clusters for services, Proxmox VMs for legacy workloads, and one CI surface that ships to both. Trade-offs documented, runbooks per component.

K8s+ VM
CI/CDunified
A.006

Microservices Monolith

Consolidated a fragmented set of small services back into a deployable monolith. Cut deploy time by 60%, removed three layers of inter-service auth, dropped ops overhead — modular boundaries kept in code, not in network.

−60%deploy time
3 svcmerged
A.007

IoT Build Pipeline

GitLab + Jenkins CI/CD for IoT automation builds at ESAB India. AKS-hosted, multi-stage — firmware artifacts and software services in one reproducible flow.

AKSplatform
GitLab+ Jenkins
A.008

Monolith Microservices

Cloud infrastructure architecture for a full monolith-to-microservices migration. CI/CD on GitLab + Jenkins, Python + Pytest automation frameworks for the new service surface.

on-prem→ cloud
Pythonautomation
§ 04

Stack & Tooling.

Filled circles indicate depth.
Containers & Orchestration
  • Kubernetes
  • AKS
  • Docker
  • Proxmox (VM)
IaC & Configuration
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • Helm
  • ArgoCD
CI/CD & Build
  • GitLab CI
  • Jenkins
  • GitHub Actions
  • Buildkite
Clouds & Infra
  • Azure
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Proxmox
  • On-Prem (OpenStack)
Languages
  • Python
  • Bash
  • Go
  • JavaScript
AI & Automation
  • Local LLM (Ollama)
  • AI Agents
  • RAG Pipelines
  • SLMs
  • MCP Servers
Observability
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Loki
  • ELK
Embedded & Hardware
  • HiL Setups
  • Firmware CI
  • IoT Pipelines
§ 05

Contact.

Open to senior DevOps, platform, and infrastructure roles — full-time or contract. Happy to talk through AI-agent and embedded-automation work in detail.
karthikpalani1710@gmail.com
Website karthikpalani.com LinkedIn in/karthik-palani GitHub github.com/karthik1710 Direct [email protected]