Ajay Akilan
Site reliability engineer at Zoom, in Bangalore. I look after the infrastructure behind chat. It runs in fifteen regions across three clouds, and I’ve been on it since 2021.
What I actually do
Zoom’s chat runs on a set of services I look after: the APIs, the real-time messaging layer, and the public edge. Fifteen regions, three clouds. I’m the service owner, so releases, incidents, capacity and cost are mine.
I’ve been on the same system for five years. You get to know which parts break, and which changes need more care than they look like they need.
What I’ve done to it
- Moved the services onto Kuberneteshours → 3 min
- Cut a seven-hour release to fifty-two minutes7h → 52m
- Replaced the public edge while it was still serving traffic−50% edge cost
- Put it in two regions at once, so losing one stopped being an event14 of 15
- Built the view of what's actually happeninghundreds of dashboards
- Took 29 to 77 percent off what it costs to run−29 → −77%
Cloud — AWS, Azure, OCI · Containers — Kubernetes (CKA), Docker · Delivery — Jenkins, GitLab CI, Tekton · IaC — Terraform, Ansible · Observability — Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch · Edge — NGINX, OpenResty, DNS at scale · Data — DynamoDB, Redis, Valkey · Languages — Python, Bash, Lua
CKA and KCNA, 2025. AWS Cloud Practitioner, 2023.
How I got the job
Zoom had grown a lot through the pandemic and was building an India team almost from scratch. They came to my college in early 2021 to fill it. I hadn’t been to the pre-placement talk, so I went into the interviews knowing very little about the company and nothing about DevOps.
Somewhere in the technical rounds they asked what I’d do if the application went down. I said: tell people straight away, be honest about how long it’ll take, say what I don’t know yet, and get the people who do know onto a call. When I didn’t know something I said so. At one point I told an interviewer that guessing would waste both our time.
A training course in my first week listed those as the principles of the job. I hadn’t known that. I’d just spent a lot of time waiting for other people to tell me what was going on.
Then I was on production and learned the rest there.
The other room
I write, direct, act, and draw. I plan the trips — for my team, for my family, for friends who’ve long since stopped pretending they’ll organise anything themselves. People ask me things because it’s easy to ask me things.
None of it is separate from the job. Build the best thing you can, learn what you’re short on, put it in front of people, and stay there while it runs.
Does this actually fit?
Paste the job description. I’ll send you an honest read — where I fit, where I don’t, and what a keyword screen would miss.
It says no when the answer is no.
The job description and your email are used to send you the report and nothing else.
If you’d rather have it plain and scannable, it’s a page and a PDF.