Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Making Production Boring

Sudeep Nag Vemulapati
Distributed Systems • AWS • DevOps • Production Engineering
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Senior Site Reliability Engineer with 15+ years of experience building scalable, resilient, high-availability distributed systems in financial and educational enterprise environments.

I build resilient cloud platforms that improve availability, reduce operational toil, and accelerate delivery.

AWS Terraform Kubernetes OpenTelemetry Splunk Jenkins
View Professional Experience
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Years Experience
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Reliability Improvement (%)
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Availability Improvement (%)
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Production Ownership Mindset
No incidents for calculating…
sre@prod-cluster ~ zsh

Professional Summary

Leadership approach, reliability mindset, and measurable production impact.

SRE Leadership

Expert in SRE best practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident response, root cause analysis, production hardening, and automation at scale, with strong emphasis on OpenTelemetry-based monitoring, Splunk-driven operational analytics, and AI-augmented engineering workflows.

Impact

Proven record of improving availability by 14%, reducing operational toil through Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and strengthening system resilience using observability-driven engineering and Chaos experimentation.

Core Competencies

Hands-on strengths in cloud, observability, automation, and performance.

Cloud & Architecture

AWS Certified Solutions Architect EC2ECSLambda S3RDSCloudWatch High AvailabilityDistributed Systems

Testing & Performance

LoadRunnerQTP Capacity PlanningScalability Testing JFRVisualVM

Observability

OpenTelemetry (OTEL) PrometheusGrafana ELK StackSplunkDynatrace New RelicCloudWatch

Automation

Terraform AssociateCloudFormation AnsibleJenkins GitOpsDocker PythonBash

SRE Practices

SLIsSLOsError Budgets Incident ResponseRCA Blameless Postmortems

AI-Augmented Engineering

AI-assisted Development Prompt-driven Prototyping AI-assisted Incident Triage Workflow Automation with AI Documentation Acceleration

Professional Experience

Impact-first work across reliability, scalable infrastructure, and incident resilience.

* Clients served as contractor through USM Business Systems

Senior Performance / DevOps Engineer

USM Business Systems – Fannie Mae

Aug 2018 – Present

  • Architected and provisioned AWS infrastructure using Terraform and CloudFormation, increasing platform availability by 14%.
  • Established and operationalized SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, improving service reliability by 18%.
  • Implemented OpenTelemetry instrumentation for distributed tracing and metrics across microservices, expanding observability coverage and accelerating incident triage.
  • Led Splunk-based telemetry and log analytics to detect anomalies, correlate incidents, and drive measurable reliability improvements.
  • Applied AI-assisted engineering workflows to streamline troubleshooting playbooks, automate operational documentation, and accelerate reliability delivery.
  • Leveraged AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Cursor) to design, build, and ship production-grade web applications — demonstrating end-to-end AI-driven development from architecture through deployment.
  • Directed production incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortems for high-traffic financial systems.
  • Automated CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows using Jenkins, Python, and Bash, reducing manual operational toil.
  • Executed chaos engineering experiments to validate microservices resilience and fault tolerance under failure scenarios.
  • Partnered with cross-functional engineering teams to eliminate performance bottlenecks and improve latency and throughput.
  • Mentored junior and mid-level engineers on SRE principles, observability practices, and incident management, driving adoption of reliability engineering culture across the team.

Senior Performance Test / Systems Automation Engineer

USM Business Systems – College Board

May 2015 – July 2018

  • Optimized distributed scoring platforms handling high-volume ETL workloads for nationwide assessments.
  • Diagnosed JVM memory leaks, thread contention, and CPU bottlenecks using JFR and VisualVM.
  • Improved system scalability through JVM tuning, infrastructure optimization, and workload modeling.
  • Designed end-to-end reliability and performance strategies for data-intensive systems.

Senior Performance Test Engineer

Remote Tiger Inc / USM – Fannie Mae

Aug 2012 – May 2015

  • Developed enterprise reliability and performance strategies for mission-critical web applications.
  • Built automated test frameworks and workload simulations using LoadRunner and QTP.
  • Delivered executive dashboards with reliability KPIs and capacity insights.

Early Engineering Journey

Detroit Technologies → Enterprise Financial Systems

Pre-2012

Started with foundational systems and performance engineering work, then scaled into large enterprise production environments and SRE leadership.

Education & Certifications

Academic foundation and certifications for cloud and platform reliability.

Education

Master of Science in Software Engineering

Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

Quick Stats

Experience

15+ years across Performance Engineering, SRE, and DevOps.

Education

Master of Science in Software Engineering.

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect Terraform Associate

Key Clients

Fannie Mae CollegeBoard Dow Chemicals

Interactive Labs

Hands-on visual demos that represent production engineering work.

Contact

Open to Senior SRE, Platform Engineering, and Production Engineering roles.

Virginia, USA

Email: svemulapati@gmx.com

Connect on LinkedIn View on GitHub

Open to Senior SRE / DevOps / Production Engineering opportunities.

Recommendations

What colleagues & clients say — sourced from LinkedIn.

Aravindan Sairaman
Technical Lead · InfoSys / Fannie Mae
May 2020 — was senior to Sudeep, same team
I had the pleasure of working with Sudeep in a MVP project as SRE. He is a technically solid engineer with good AWS skills and in other testing tools. He quickly adapts to change. He constantly updates his skillset and looks for opportunity to do things better and in an efficient manner. He is very good at automating things and is really passionate about his work.
Aravind Srinivasan
Senior Engineer
January 2020 — worked on the same team
Had opportunity to work with Sudeep in Collegeboard. He was a terrific Performance engineer and extremely knowledgeable in his field of experience. Extremely friendly and good in guiding people with his experience.
Bahar Shad
President, CMIT of Alexandria — Cybersecurity + AI + Managed IT
May 2018 — managed Sudeep directly
Sudeep is one of the smartest engineers that I have worked with in my career. He always is willing to take new challenges and calls them “opportunities for learning.” Sudeep’s high level of work ethics makes him a valuable asset for any employer who would hire him. If I had another chance, I would hire him again!
Devarpi Sheth
Distinguished Engineer, Capital One
May 2018 — senior colleague, College Board
Sudeep and I worked on a critical project at CB, mainly IAM move to AWS cloud — supporting 2,000 req/sec on the service side and 300 req/sec for login. He was quick to understand all requirements and helped us find the perfect EC2 configuration with scaling settings. He was new to AWS yet learnt everything in no time. He is very detail-oriented — during Scorematch he completed the most complex data setup in a week that others spent almost a month on. Very smart, and will be missed dearly. It is a loss to CB. Good luck Sudeep!
Don Tidd
Senior Systems Engineer, The College Board
May 2018 — senior colleague
We brought Sudeep to CB for his Performance Tuning expertise. His work within the team has been excellent. Very detail-oriented — he will get to the root cause of any performance issue. He was asked to work on a large portfolio of projects: business services, presentation applications, backend, database, gateways, IAM, AWS — including developing a framework for testing reports. Sudeep will consistently have a good solution. Hard to see him go!
Gregory Pursifull
Interests: capital allocation, risk/reward, technology delivery
June 2018 — client at College Board
I have had the good fortune to work with Sudeep in the role of Performance Engineer at the College Board. Sudeep has excellent analytical and interpersonal skills. I have experienced his work modeling and preparing test plans, scripting, and reporting on a wide range of critical applications with unique non-functional requirements. These skills and experiences will make Sudeep an excellent fit in any organization attempting to measure and understand the limits of their application and service portfolio.
Jean Mack
Owner, Aria Solutions LLC
May 2018 — client at College Board
I worked with Sudeep in regards to performance testing my team’s application. He is easy to work with and knew his job well. He had a lot of patience for re-running testing and re-trying things and I appreciated that. He was always thorough at recording performance information that we could review and showed persistence in getting the job done under tight deadlines. Thanks for your efforts, Sudeep!
Jim Zhang
Principal Software Engineer, The College Board
May 2018 — worked on the same project
I worked with Sudeep on several performance test projects. He is very good at writing test scripts, troubleshooting, and publishing test reports. Our team is very happy with his performance.
Marie Godin
Scrum Master, The College Board
May 2018 — was senior to Sudeep, same org
Sudeep is an experienced, goal-oriented, and highly motivated engineer. He is flexible when priorities change and drives projects to completion even with the tightest schedule. He works independently as effectively as on a team and willingly assists on important projects even when it’s not his direct responsibility. He’s both a great engineer and a great team member. Any company should consider themselves fortunate to have Sudeep on their team; we certainly have!
Tom Cerami
Engineering Manager
May 2018 — client at College Board
Sudeep did performance testing for several projects under my portfolio and was a pleasure to partner with. He identified numerous opportunities for improvement as well as uncovering complex issues across multiple teams. His technical presentations were always well received and his ability to answer questions on the fly was greatly appreciated.
Umesh Yadav
Head of IT Strategy, Architecture & Business Delivery, The Nature Conservancy
May 2018 — worked on different teams
Sudeep is very detail-oriented and committed to his deliverables. He is very technical and understands customer expectations around Performance Testing and Business scenario testing. He is a great team player and willing to help anybody. Great to know him.
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