Kunal Malhotra

FPT Software Sep 2024 – Present

Lead Platform Engineer

• Built agentic AI workflows that connect core platform systems (Kubernetes, Terraform, SaltStack) to LLMs through custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, letting engineers query and operate infrastructure in natural language and reducing time spent on routine platform tasks.
• Architected a Kubernetes-based landing zone on Google Cloud with a multi-cluster Istio service mesh, supporting 0-to-scale infrastructure patterns with Terraform IaC and full observability (multi-cluster ELK, Grafana, Thanos, Prometheus).
• Led the implementation of Apache Airflow on Kubernetes to orchestrate and execute the ETL pipelines that process financial-statement data.
• Led an SRE/DevOps transformation for a multinational bank, running application assessment and implementing a DORA-aligned deployment framework across hybrid infrastructure (OpenShift, IBM Power, IBM Mainframe).
• Built a FinOps platform from scratch using OpenCost and Prometheus, achieving 20% infrastructure cost reduction across client implementations.
• Developed a VM migration solution using KubeVirt into OpenShift/AWS, enabling secure workload isolation while modernizing legacy systems.
• Interview and hire DevOps engineers for the platform team, focusing on automation via agentic AI workflows, DevOps/GitOps and cloud skills.

McKinsey & Company Jan 2023 – Oct 2023

Senior Cloud Engineer I — Cloud by McKinsey

• Embedded with enterprise clients as a cloud architecture consultant, specializing in cloud-native architecture and DevOps transformation.
• Led FinOps and SRE initiatives for a multinational firm, optimizing IaaS/PaaS and OpenShift workloads and cutting cloud spend by roughly 20%.
• Designed automated testing workflows for a financial institution's MQ-based applications using Azure DevOps, improving release reliability.

N26 Dec 2021 – Dec 2022

Site Reliability Engineer

• Architected and engineered the automation and infrastructure (multi-VPC architecture, site-to-site VPN) to integrate a partner bank, enabling N26 to process instant payments in a Eurozone country; the solution supports over 1 million payments per day.
• Implemented a service mesh using Istio across the heterogeneous environment, laying the foundation for a zero-trust network.
• Led a proof of concept to extend the Istio service mesh to virtual machine workloads, deploying Istio on VMs so they could join the mesh and gain end-to-end mTLS encryption, routing, and service discovery.
• Built automation for the connectivity team's AWS maintenance work, eliminating potential human error and reducing maintenance time by 95%.
• Maintained company-wide networking platform services: AWS site-to-site VPNs with external partners, client-to-site VPNs for employees, and securing of networking components (VPC, load balancers, PrivateLinks, DNS, certificate and secret management). Handled developer on-call support, incident response, and root-cause analysis.

IBM Sep 2017 – Nov 2021

Cloud Platform Engineer Oct 2018 – Nov 2021

• Led the migration of a multinational bank's mobile banking platform from on-prem to cloud: assessing which services could move with minimal change, re-engineering those that could not, building the landing zone, integrating with the bank's on-prem network, migrating data safely, building CI/CD pipelines, and implementing the IBM Cloud for Financial Services framework for risk and compliance.
• Led the implementation of Red Hat OpenShift at the edge for a multinational bank, enabling it to deliver services while meeting data-residency compliance requirements.
• Co-authored the “Client Reference Architecture Playbook,” an IBM Academy of Technology initiative used globally by clients to set cloud-native architecture strategy.
• Worked with the global tech sales team on a scalable KubeVirt platform strategy to modernize customer workloads across hybrid cloud environments.
• Created and delivered enablement on cloud-native technologies (Docker, OpenShift, Kubernetes, Istio, Tekton, Terraform, KubeVirt, IBM Cloud) to enterprise clients and IBM teams; delivered pilots and projects for clients across regulated industries.

Cloud Advocate and Developer Sep 2017 – Sep 2018

• Designed and built a proof of concept automating insurance claims via blockchain for a government client; the PoC was selected and showcased at the Arab Health Conference 2018.
• Delivered the MVP of a government project as front-end developer, establishing a solid foundation for the work.
• Built an Android application that performed facial recognition using a custom-trained IBM Watson Visual Recognition model.
• Trained 100+ developers on IBM Cloud technologies through workshops and hands-on labs.

BITS Pilani — Dubai Campus Class of 2018

Bachelor of Engineering (Honors), Computer Science

• Thesis — Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis Using Apache Spark: built a framework for large-scale sentiment analysis across hundreds of nodes using Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, MLlib, Pandas, and Python; implemented the bag-of-words algorithm from scratch.