VIJAYARAGHAVAN KUNALAN
Melbourne,Australia
Summary
Accomplished Senior Cloud Engineer at Thoughtworks with expertise in AWS and Terraform, driving significant CI/CD modernization and cost optimization. Proven ability in incident management and disaster recovery planning, enhancing security through AWS WAFv2 implementations. Adept at collaborating across teams to deliver impactful solutions in dynamic environments.
Overview
8
8
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Cloud Engineer
Thoughtworks
Melbourne, Australia
06.2023 - Current
- Own and operate multi-account AWS environments for enterprise clients, covering security, reliability, and cost optimisation
- Design and maintain Terraform modules for ECS, RDS, WAF, IAM, monitoring, and networking
- Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvements
- Collaborate with customers, vendors, and internal teams across multiple time zones
- Key Achievements - CI/CD Modernisation & Performance: Built and enhanced Bitbucket Pipelines and GitHub Actions for multiple services, introducing parallel steps, caching, and artifact reuse to significantly reduce build and deployment times across environments
- WAF & Security Hardening: Designed and implemented AWS WAFv2 WebACLs with path-based rules, rate limiting, and IP sets (Terraform), significantly reducing malicious traffic and noisy alerts
- Disaster Recovery (Pilot Light): Designed and executed a pilot-light DR strategy across AWS accounts, including S3 replication, ECS-on-demand deployment via Bitbucket pipelines, and Cloudflare cutover procedures
- Frontend / Backend Decoupling: Led migration of Angular frontend from ECS to S3 + CloudFront, retaining APIs on ECS behind ALB, including Lambda@Edge request rewrites and dedicated CI/CD pipelines
- Cost Optimisation: Analysed RDS, ECS, OpenSearch, and CloudWatch spend; recommended instance right-sizing, lifecycle policies, and reservations, delivering measurable monthly savings
DevOps Engineer
Webcentral
04.2022 - 06.2023
- Managed and supported AWS ECS-based microservices in production
- Built and maintained Jenkins CI/CD pipelines integrated with GitHub and Jira
- Provisioned AWS infrastructure using Terraform
- Implemented and operated 1Password Connect and logging integrations (Splunk)
Senior Consultant
HCL Technologies
09.2020 - 05.2022
- Supported and migrated TIBCO middleware platforms on AWS
- Automated infrastructure provisioning using Terraform, Ansible, and Packer
- Implemented log ingestion using CloudWatch Agent and Kinesis Firehose
Consultant
Capgemini
03.2018 - 12.2019
- Delivered AWS cloud migrations for enterprise applications, moving on‑prem workloads to EC2, ECS, and Fargate
- Automated infrastructure provisioning using Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible
- Built CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and Git-based workflows
- Supported containerised workloads using Docker and early Kubernetes deployments
Education
Master of Engineering - Computer Science
University of Hertfordshire
UKBachelor of Engineering - Information Technology
Anna University
IndiaSkills
- AWS
- Terraform
- CloudFormation
- Bitbucket Pipelines
- Jenkins
- GitHub Actions
- AWS CodePipeline
- Docker
- ECS
- Kubernetes
- AWS WAFv2
- Security Hub
- Inspector
- GuardDuty
- IAM hardening
- Datadog
- CloudWatch
- CloudWatch Logs
- Athena
- Bash
- Python
- Boto3
- Ansible
- Packer
- Incident management
- DR planning
- Patching
- Cost optimisation
Certification
- AWS Certified Cloud Engineer
- HashiCorp Terraform Associate
Core Skills
AWS (EC2, ECS, Fargate, ALB, Lambda, VPC, RDS, S3, CloudFront, IAM, Route53), Terraform (modules, multi-account), CloudFormation, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, Docker, ECS, Kubernetes (working knowledge), AWS WAFv2, Security Hub, Inspector, GuardDuty, IAM hardening, Datadog, CloudWatch, CloudWatch Logs, Athena, Bash, Python (boto3), Ansible, Packer, Incident management, DR planning, patching (Windows/Linux), cost optimisation
Timeline
Senior Cloud Engineer
Thoughtworks
06.2023 - Current
DevOps Engineer
Webcentral
04.2022 - 06.2023
Senior Consultant
HCL Technologies
09.2020 - 05.2022
Consultant
Capgemini
03.2018 - 12.2019
Master of Engineering - Computer Science
University of Hertfordshire
Bachelor of Engineering - Information Technology
Anna University