Chaitanya Gollavilli — DevOps & AI Engineer

cat about.json

About Me

I'm Chaitanya Gollavilli — a Senior DevOps Engineer and AI Solutions Architect based in Atlanta, GA, with around 10 years of experience turning complex cloud infrastructure problems into clean, automated solutions.

At Experian, I work across Kubernetes (EKS) platform engineering, GenAI tooling, and cloud infrastructure — building and maintaining the systems that other engineering teams depend on daily.

My edge is the DevOps × Gen AI intersection. I've built RAG-based developer support systems on AWS Bedrock, architected event-driven Kubernetes platforms, and brought real AI into day-to-day engineering workflows — not as a side project, but as production-grade infrastructure.

I hold 5 certifications across AWS, HashiCorp, and Databricks and actively mentor offshore teams across India, UK, and Costa Rica.

10+

years of experience

cloud certifications

enterprise employers

∞

prod deployments

git log --oneline experience/

Work Experience

# every role a checkpoint in time

July 2021 → Present · 3+ years

Experian / Sr. DevOps Engineer

Senior DevOps Engineer

📍 Atlanta, GA

Architected and deployed a globally adopted AI-powered Slack chatbot across Experian's engineering org using AWS Bedrock, RAG pipelines, and OpenSearch Serverless — delivering real-time, context-aware infrastructure troubleshooting at scale.
Led migration from self-managed Karpenter to EKS AutoMode with zero downtime, eliminating manual AMI patching pipelines and significantly reducing platform operational overhead.
Established Karpenter as the standard node provisioning solution across EKS clusters, configuring NodePools and NodeClasses for workload-based consolidation, reducing over-provisioning and compute costs.
Enabled event-driven autoscaling for Kubernetes workloads using KEDA, optimizing resource consumption based on queue depth and traffic metrics.
Architected a NATS-based event messaging platform for Kubernetes, enabling horizontally scalable consumer processing across dynamically scaled pods in collaboration with Synadia engineering.
Developed MCP-compatible integrations enabling LLM agents to securely access internal APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and operational tooling — creating a standardized AI-to-DevOps interface.
Led CI/CD modernization: migrated builds from Jenkins to Harness and GitHub Actions, embedding shift-left security scans and infrastructure validation into all pipelines.
Implemented Wiz for enterprise cloud security posture management, enabling continuous scanning for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposed secrets across AWS and container environments.
Built an automated EKS upgrade readiness checker via GitHub Actions — scanning clusters for deprecated APIs and upgrade risks, reducing manual effort across Kubernetes environments.
Implemented Datadog observability across platforms with custom dashboards, metrics, and alerting for proactive anomaly detection and reliable on-call operations.
Led enterprise-wide resource tagging initiative, enforcing ownership standards through automated build and deployment controls across multiple engineering teams.
Onboarded offshore engineering teams in India, UK, and Costa Rica on cloud infrastructure, pipelines, and internal platforms to support 24/7 operations.

AWS BedrockEKSKarpenter KEDANATSGitHub Actions HarnessWizDatadog PythonTroposphereCloudFormation

Oct 2017 → July 2021 · ~4 years

Verizon Wireless / Cloud DevOps Engineer

Cloud DevOps Engineer

📍 Atlanta, GA

Implemented Terraform at enterprise scale, automating full infrastructure deployment across networking, compute, storage, analytics, and security services.
Created and managed enterprise Kubernetes clusters, automating complete deployment processes and managing Helm charts for reproducible, reliable releases.
Built a Text Analytics platform to extract and redact PII from high-volume IOT and Call Connect streams, feeding data into SageMaker and Comprehend for sentiment analysis.
Developed enterprise-hardened AMIs for all OS images using CIS Level 1 & 2 benchmarks, with EC2 Image Builder pipelines for monthly automated AMI build and release.
Implemented Kinesis Firehose to stream millions of container logs to Splunk, and deployed Prometheus + Grafana for infrastructure metrics.
Unified VPC communication by consolidating multiple NAT/IGW setups into single Ingress/Egress points using Transit Gateway, improving network architecture and cost efficiency.

TerraformKubernetesHelm JenkinsAnsiblePrometheus SageMakerELKPython

grep -r "impact" achievements.log

Key Wins

01 / impact

Gen AI Slack Chatbot — Global Deployment

Architected and shipped an AI-powered developer support chatbot on AWS Bedrock with RAG pipelines, deployed across Experian's entire engineering organization. Reduced manual DevOps triage and accelerated incident resolution at scale.

02 / platform

EKS AutoMode Migration — Zero Downtime

Led the enterprise migration from self-managed Karpenter to EKS AutoMode, eliminating manual AMI patching pipelines and significantly cutting platform operational overhead without any production disruption.

03 / automation

Automated EKS Upgrade Readiness Pipeline

Built a GitHub Actions-powered EKS upgrade readiness checker that scans clusters for deprecated APIs and upgrade risks using EKS upgrade insights — turning a days-long manual process into minutes.

04 / ai-ops

MCP-Compatible LLM Agent Integrations

Developed MCP-compatible integrations enabling LLM agents to securely query internal APIs, CI/CD pipelines, and operational tooling — establishing a standardized interface between AI assistants and enterprise DevOps systems.

05 / infra

NATS Event Messaging Platform on Kubernetes

Architected a NATS-based event messaging platform enabling horizontally scalable consumer processing across dynamically scaled pods, in collaboration with Synadia's engineering team.

06 / security

Enterprise Shift-Left Security Program

Drove adoption of Wiz, GitHub Advanced Security, and Checkmarx across CI/CD pipelines — embedding security scanning before code merges and implementing enterprise-wide cloud security posture management.