Operational Excellence Hands-On

R AJ A VASARALA

!"# Santa Clara, CA

408-***-**** **********@*****.*** www.linkedin.com/in/ravasarala Customer Focus / Emerging Technology / Strategy / Leadership / Operational Excellence Forward-thinking professional with 20+ years of driving engineering strategy, roadmap, and operations for F500 companies like IBM, Oracle, Yahoo, Juniper Networks and Cisco, as well as startups in Optical Networks, Energy, IOT, Mobile and Ad analytics. Hands-on and inspiring leader skilled in building and guiding high-performance teams, ensuring global alignment and collaborative work cultures. Adept at balancing complex technical architectures and business requirements to deliver secure, scalable and reliable products with high availability, stability and serviceability.

SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS

• Directed global infrastructure and cloud operations at IBM and Oracle, leading large-scale modernization, reliability enhancements, and regulatory compliance initiatives (NIST, FedRAMP) supporting critical workloads for multi-billion-dollar global businesses.

• Recognized executive leader known for building dynamic global teams, driving scalable processes, and collaborating with diverse stakeholders and strategic vendors—from startups to global enterprises.

• Led complex engineering and cybersecurity initiatives at IBM—Financially Secure Cloud (risk modeling, threat analysis, incident response, compliance), reducing Sev1 incidents by 30%, and driving vulnerability management and DevSecOps adoption.

• Transformed prototype technologies into production-ready solutions on AWS at Street line—led deployment of wireless mesh network with 20,000+ smart sensors across Los Angeles, San Carlos, and other smart cities; provided real-time parking visibility and enterprise-grade analytics.

• Awarded OCI “Get Well Project” recognition for driving root cause analysis (RCA) and service recovery, significantly improving platform reliability, infrastructure stability, and operational excellence.

• Modernized Yahoo Mail’s core platform supporting 260M+ users and 5B+ daily emails; built Yahoo Media’s (Music) e-commerce system—driving a 20%+ subscriber growth and recurring revenue. CORE COMPETENCIES

Strategy & Visioning / Engineering Management (incl. cross-functional) / Hands-On Leadership / Talent Development

/ Program & Project Management / Continuous Improvement / Budgeting Scalable & Resilient Systems / Coaching & Mentoring / Stakeholder Engagement / Vendor & Partner Management PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

TELEGAMEZ – PARTNER (FOUNDING TEAM MEMBER) 2025 – PRESENT Real-time Agentic AI video chat platform with conversation agents and interactive social activities. Leading architecture and design of a distributed, real-time conversational AI platform, integrating OpenAI Whisper/GPT STT, Cartesia TTS, and Groq LLM. Designed horizontal scaling architecture with room-affinity socket orchestration and optimized AI response workflows to synthesize speech once per room and broadcast via WebSocket to multiple users.

IBM HYBRID CLOUD/EDGE COMPUTING - ENGINEERING LEADER 2020 – 2024 Functioned as Head of Engineering, driving end-to-end execution from strategy to deployment while ensuring a high- quality bar – contributing to a $17B revenue portfolio. Provided hands-on leadership across systems, programs

(including multinational banks), services, & a global team of 50.

• Led cross-domain quality initiatives across infra, platform, observability, SRE and DevSecOps—cutting incidents by nearly one-third across legacy and H100-powered next-gen data centers.

• Championed platform usability improvements as internal product owner, synthesizing feedback from operations, security, and other stakeholders as a member of the UX advisory committee.

• Orchestrated quarterly planning, cross-functional alignment sessions, roadmap execution, architectural design, deployment, quality control, and prioritization reviews across infrastructure and platform domains. Raj Avasarala 408-***-**** **********@*****.*** Page 2

• Drove the development and deployment of AI/ML-based anomaly detection for observability pipelines to mitigate outages, collaborating with research leads on unsupervised modeling and production deployment strategy.

• Forged strategic alignment and seamless coordination with Red Hat, the CTO office, and executive leadership as the principal liaison for Greenfield initiatives (Service Interconnect – apps/infra), leading POCs and prioritizing features.

PULSE SECURE - PARTNER MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT 2019 – 2020 Maintained alignment with strategic partner Platform9 (Managed Kubernetes) in leading on-prem deployment for Pulse Zero Trust Access, applications and services that provided positive impacts on customers.

• Established a structured vision in managing the program, crafting a roadmap & resource plan, leading a POC and overseeing tech preview and phase 1 of integration while navigating the onset of pandemic challenges. ORACLE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE (OCI) - SENIOR DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING 2016 – 2019 Built and led a globally distributed 40+ member cross-functional team for Network Automation, Infrastructure, Monitoring, and Edge Services (Fast Connect – Cloud migrations), supporting public, private and sovereign cloud environments across 20+ regions and multiple datacenters contributing to $2B+ in annual revenue for Oracle’s Public Cloud business group.

• Delivered a scalable CLOS-based (Leaf-Spine) network automation platform centralizing management of underlay and overlay networks:

o Reduced provisioning time by 75%, decreased manual configuration errors by 85%, supporting continuity for 10,000+ applications.

o Provided unified real-time visibility and efficient fault remediation across globally.

• Facilitated Scrum of Scrums across globally distributed teams, driving alignment, managing inter-team dependencies, and ensuring on-time delivery of critical infrastructure and platform initiatives.

• Directed architectural strategy and roadmap for next-generation intent-based network orchestration, inventory management, and microservices-based provisioning workflows

• Partnered strategically with leading hardware vendors to align technology and business goals.

• Enhanced organizational capability through structured mentorship programs, performance reviews, and technical workshops, accelerating onboarding, increasing engagement, and improving talent retention. SENTIENT ENERGY (ACQUIRED BY KOCH) - DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING 2015 – 2016 Led Analytics platform development and deployment of cost-effective line sensors via RF Mesh & Cellular.

• First hire on the Analytics team; scaled locally & aligned with offshore team to grow to 20+ engineers and managers.

• Led deployment of platform & RF mesh sensors for clients like PG&E & Silver Spring Networks, contributing to

$40M+ in deals. Scaled 25k devices for major energy customers to meet their growing power analytics needs.

• Identified the bottlenecks and Improved operations output by 40% through SCRUM and integrated quality processes by quickly iterating through the customer problems. JUNIPER NETWORKS - SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER 2013 – 2015 Delivered DPI (Qosmos) and Analytics for Traffic Detection Functionality in LTE networks, a new program initiative

(NPI), and guided a separate Virtualization effort as a primary liaison with the Junos Space Platform.

• Drove development of key data path features for Juniper MX routers, enabling subscriber services, LTE analytics, and DPI—powering $100M+ in product revenue.

• Managed a geographically distributed team of 25 engineers; participated in skill development, planning and integrations, becoming a go-to resource for executive management.

• Delivered a 30% cost savings through hands-on architecture and global team collaboration. ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE - DIRECTOR OF MOBILE/APPLICATIONS & INFRASTRUCTURE @ STREET LINE, INC (ACQUIRED BY KAPSCH); PRINCIPAL FOR MEDIA & MAIL PLATFORM ENGINEERING @ YAHOO!; LEAD ENGINEER ROLES AT AT&T, BROADCOM, ZAFFIRE AND CISCO SYSTEMS/AVAYA. 1997 – 2013

• Led significant technical and strategic initiatives in telecom, networking, and mobile/web application & infrastructure development.

• Managed global teams, including cross-functional and vendor collaboration across multiple time zones Raj Avasarala 408-***-**** **********@*****.*** Page 3

• Delivered scalable, foundational platform and infrastructure solutions that drove user growth, revenue enhancement, and operational efficiency.

TECHNICAL SKILLS, TRAINING & EDUCATION

Skill Domain Technologies/Tools

Cloud Platforms AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, aws-sdk), Azure, Oracle Cloud (OCI Compute, Autonomous DB), IBM Cloud

Programming Languages &

Frameworks

Python, Golang, C/C++, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, gRPC, Hibernate, Cross- platform mobile app, Node.js, Express.js, Drizzle ORM, iOS, Android, TypeScript, Next.js, React

Data Platforms & Messaging /

Databases

Kafka, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MongoDB, Redis, Memcache, Celery, Amazon EMR, Storm, InfluxDB, Neo4j, Amazon Redshift & S3, IBM COS DevOps / Infra Automation &

Container Orchestration

VMware ESX / vCenter / vSphere, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Kind, Helm, Ansible, Chef, Swagger, Postman, Nomad, Consul, RANCID, JFrog CI/CD & Pipeline Automation: TeamCity, Jenkins, Tekton, GitHub Actions Real-time Communication WebRTC, Socket.IO

Web Application Servers &

Proxies Apache, Flask, NGINX, Envoy

Monitoring / Observability &

Incident Mgmt.

Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, ELK Stack, PagerDuty, Instana, NetFlow with BGP, Kentik, ThousandEyes, AppNeta, NetBrain

Networking IPv4, IPv6, TCP/IP, HTTP(S), DNS, SNMP, SSL/TLS, MPLS, BGP, IS-IS, QoS, NFS

(NetApp), Network Config Mgmt. (Juniper, Cisco, Arista) Security & Identity Keycloak, OAuth 2.0, LDAP, CrowdStrike, Vault, Red Hat IDM Geospatial & Mapping Google Maps API, Mapbox

Collaboration & Mgmt. Tools Aha, Jira, Mural, Microsoft Project, Excel, MermaidChart Architecture & AI Technologies

Core ML/AI Libraries: TensorFlow, Keras, LangChain, FAISS, ImageBind GenAI Architectures: RAG, Embeddings, Prompt Eng, Agentic use cases Dev & Integration: MCP, Jupyter, Google Colab, Cursor Service Platforms: LLMs (OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, xAI) Speech AI: Deepgram, OpenAI Whisper, Cartesia

Training & Certifications: Deep Learning AI/ML specialization, Advanced learning algorithms & Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, & Reinforcement Learning certified from Stanford University, Hands-on understanding of NLP pipelines using Hugging Face and PyTorch– See LinkedIn for more training & publications Oklahoma University: M.S, Computer Science Osmania University: B.S, Computer Science EXTRACURRICULARS: AI Leaders Club, TiEcon: Collaborating with AI leaders-use case discussions & peer learning, Soccer coach

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