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MK
Mohan Kumar BN Platform Engineer · Kubestronaut
ABOUT // PROFESSIONAL NARRATIVE

13+ Years Engineering Mission-Critical Infrastructure & Cloud-Native Platforms

I am a Senior Platform Engineer and CNCF Certified Kubestronaut based in Bangalore, India, specializing in enterprise multi-cluster container platforms, GitOps delivery architectures, and Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) that transform infrastructure into self-service products.

Currently at Henkel, I architect and operate enterprise Red Hat OpenShift platforms hosting both cloud-native microservices and virtualized workloads via OpenShift Virtualization. I build golden paths using Port IDP, OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD), Tekton (OpenShift Pipelines), GitLab CI/CD, HashiCorp Vault with External Secrets Operator, Wiz CNAPP security guardrails, and Veeam Kasten disaster recovery.

Previously as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at OpsRamp (an HPE company) and Technical Lead at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, I maintained 99.9% production SLAs for SaaS observability platforms, engineered software supply chain security with Cosign and OPA Gatekeeper, and led multi-cloud Infrastructure as Code across 60+ Kubernetes clusters and 200+ cloud projects.

Beyond enterprise engineering, I run the MKBN-Tech YouTube channel and engineering blog (700+ subscribers, 45K+ views), publishing production-grade masterclasses on OpenShift HA upgrades, ephemeral GitOps environments, Ceph/Longhorn storage, and Autonomous AI SRE agents.

Mohan Kumar BN
CURRENT ROLE Senior Platform Engineer @ Henkel
LOCATION Bangalore, India
FLAGSHIP DISTINCTION CNCF Kubestronaut
CORE OWNERSHIP & LEADERSHIP

Architectural Pillars & Areas of Ownership

60+ Kubernetes Clusters · 200+ Cloud Projects

Enterprise Multi-Cluster Platforms

Full lifecycle ownership of on-premises Red Hat OpenShift and cloud-managed GKE/AKS/EKS fleets—spanning zero-downtime HA upgrades, capacity engineering, and converged container + VM orchestration.

Zero-Drift Declarative Delivery · Self-Service Golden Paths

Internal Developer Platforms & GitOps

Designing self-service developer portals with Port, declarative continuous delivery with OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD), Helm/Kustomize templates, and Kubernetes-native CI/CD with Tekton & GitLab.

Vault + ESO · Cosign + OPA · Wiz CNAPP

Zero-Trust Security & Supply Chain Governance

Eliminating static credentials via HashiCorp Vault & External Secrets Operator, enforcing Cosign image signing & OPA admission gates, and integrating Wiz CNAPP posture management.

99.9% Production SLA · Autonomous L1 Remediation

Site Reliability, Observability & AI Ops

Architecting Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and Loki telemetry stacks alongside Veeam Kasten DR and autonomous AI SRE agents (CrewAI, Ollama, K8sGPT) for rapid incident remediation.

CAREER PROGRESSION // 2012 – PRESENT

Engineering Career Journey

From foundational enterprise networking and server engineering at Cisco and Dell to leading multi-cloud DevOps, SRE, and OpenShift Platform Engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpsRamp, and Henkel.

01 // June 2023 – Present CURRENT ROLE

Senior Platform Engineer

Henkel · Bangalore, India

Red Hat OpenShift Internal Developer Platform (Port) GitOps & Tekton CI/CD Zero-Trust Security & Vault SRE & Disaster Recovery

Architecting, operating, and scaling enterprise-grade on-premises Red Hat OpenShift platforms hosting business-critical containerized microservices and virtualized workloads across multiple production and non-production clusters.

  • Own full day-2 operations and lifecycle management of multiple Red Hat OpenShift production and non-production clusters—driving capacity planning, zero-downtime HA upgrades, performance tuning, patching, and platform reliability.
  • Architected a unified application platform supporting both cloud-native microservices and virtual machine workloads via OpenShift Virtualization, enabling seamless modernization of legacy workloads.
  • Built and enhanced an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) using Port, empowering application teams with self-service workflows and golden paths for namespace provisioning, onboarding, and resource governance.
  • Engineered Kubernetes-native CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI/CD and Tekton (OpenShift Pipelines), coupled with declarative continuous delivery via OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD), Helm, and Kustomize to eliminate configuration drift.
  • Designed enterprise secrets management and runtime workload identity patterns using HashiCorp Vault and External Secrets Operator (ESO), eliminating hard-coded credentials across all clusters.
  • Implemented full-stack observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and Loki, alongside SRE practices for service health monitoring, post-incident reviews, and proactive bottleneck detection.
  • Implemented enterprise backup, restore, and disaster recovery using Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes applications, persistent volumes, and virtualized workloads with regular recovery validation.
  • Partnered with security teams to integrate Wiz CNAPP posture management and enforced strict multi-tenant OpenShift security controls including RBAC, Security Context Constraints (SCCs), NetworkPolicies, and resource quotas.
Red Hat OpenShift OpenShift Virtualization Port IDP OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD) Tekton (OpenShift Pipelines) GitLab CI/CD Helm Kustomize HashiCorp Vault External Secrets Operator Prometheus Grafana Loki Veeam Kasten Wiz CNAPP
02 // September 2022 – June 2023

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

OpsRamp (A Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company) · India

Site Reliability Engineering Software Supply Chain Security GKE & Hybrid Kubernetes Distributed Storage & Data Ops

Ensured 24/7 high availability (99.9% SLA) for the OpsRamp SaaS monitoring platform across hybrid cloud and on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure spanning microservices and stateful data clusters.

  • Maintained 24/7 high availability of the OpsRamp SaaS observability platform adhering to a strict 99.9% production SLA across a hybrid architecture (70% microservices, 30% monoliths).
  • Established a secure software supply chain by signing container images with Cosign, gating cluster deployments via OPA Policy Agent, and scanning images for CVEs using Snyk and Trivy.
  • Provisioned managed Kubernetes clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) via Terraform and orchestrated multi-environment Helm releases across INT, QA, Dev, UAT, and Production.
  • Implemented on-premises cloud-native distributed block storage for Kubernetes stateful workloads using Longhorn.
  • Managed mission-critical stateful data infrastructure spanning MySQL databases, Apache Kafka streaming clusters, Apache Cassandra, and ZooKeeper.
  • Automated hybrid configuration management using SaltStack and engineered self-healing operational workflows, load testing, and Prometheus/Grafana observability.
Kubernetes GKE Helm Terraform Cosign OPA Policy Agent Snyk Trivy Longhorn SaltStack Prometheus Grafana Apache Kafka Cassandra MySQL GitLab Jenkins
03 // June 2017 – September 2022

Technical Lead — Cloud & DevOps

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) · Bangalore, India

Multi-Cloud Architecture Infrastructure as Code Technical Leadership CI/CD Automation

Led Cloud and DevOps engineering initiatives across multi-cloud environments (Azure and AWS), driving reusable Terraform Infrastructure as Code, Ansible configuration management, and enterprise observability.

  • Provided technical leadership and mentorship to the Cloud and DevOps engineering team, establishing architectural standards for cloud-native delivery and automation.
  • Led multi-cloud Infrastructure as Code (IaC) implementation using modular, reusable Terraform blueprints across Microsoft Azure and AWS.
  • Automated configuration management and orchestration across Red Hat Enterprise Linux and VMware infrastructure using Ansible.
  • Engineered automated CI/CD deployment pipelines with Jenkins integrated with IaC validation frameworks, artifact repositories, and security gates.
  • Optimized multi-cloud resource utilization and FinOps efficiency through workload rightsizing, autoscaling, and automated resource scheduling.
  • Designed disaster recovery, business continuity, and Prometheus/Grafana observability solutions integrated with incident management workflows.
Microsoft Azure AWS Terraform Ansible Jenkins Red Hat Enterprise Linux VMware Prometheus Grafana Git
04 // May 2016 – June 2017

Server Support Engineer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (Payroll: Net Connect Pvt. Ltd.) · Bangalore, India

Linux & Virtualization OS Security Hardening Backup & Recovery

Managed Linux and Windows Server infrastructure on VMware ESXi, OS hardening, container/build tooling, and enterprise backup/disaster recovery procedures.

  • Provisioned, hardened, and maintained Linux distributions and Windows Server instances across VMware ESXi virtualization clusters.
  • Configured developer build and container runtime environments including Docker, Docker Compose, Maven, Ant, Gradle, and Java Runtime Environments across Dev, Test, and Prod.
  • Implemented and periodically validated virtual machine backup and disaster recovery restoration runbooks.
Linux Windows Server VMware ESXi Docker Docker Compose Maven Gradle
05 // May 2015 – May 2016

Client Tech Support Associate

Dell International · Bangalore, India

Server Storage & RAID Root Cause Diagnostics

Delivered server and systems troubleshooting for enterprise and commercial clients across the US and Canada, focusing on RAID storage, migrations, and root-cause log diagnostics.

  • Resolved critical server and infrastructure issues including RAID array configuration, storage expansion, OS migrations, and networking diagnostics.
  • Performed deep system log analysis to isolate hardware and software root causes under strict response SLAs.
Server Hardware RAID Storage Linux/Windows OS Network Diagnostics
06 // January 2014 – May 2015

Sr. IT Analyst

Cisco Systems (Payroll: STS Info Technologies Ltd) · Bangalore, India

Enterprise Networking Routing & Switching Global TAC Operations

Provided global TAC engineering support for enterprise LAN/WAN, wireless, and routing & switching infrastructure.

  • Delivered end-to-end TAC resolution for global enterprise customers across LAN, WAN, Wireless, and Routing & Switching topologies.
  • Coordinated with L3/ERT engineering teams to isolate software/hardware defects and authored technical knowledge base documentation.
Cisco IOS Routing & Switching LAN/WAN TCP/IP DNS/DHCP
07 // October 2012 – January 2014

Customer Service Representative — IT Infrastructure

Amvensys Technologies · Bangalore, India

IT Service Management Systems Administration

Managed IT infrastructure incidents, Active Directory administration, VPN connectivity, and Oracle database tooling.

  • Managed IT infrastructure incidents within customer SLA targets and supported Oracle 10gR2, TOAD, Active Directory, and VPN client operations.
Active Directory Oracle 10gR2 VPN Windows Administration
COMMUNITY & MENTORSHIP

MKBN-Tech & Microsoft Certified Trainer Alumni

Sharing engineering knowledge has been a core pillar of my career—both as a 4-year Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT, 2020–2024) mentoring cloud engineers and as the creator of MKBN-Tech on YouTube (700+ subscribers · 45K+ views) and mkbntech.com.

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATION

Engineering Education & Programs

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Electronics and Communication Engineering

PES University · Bangalore, India

DevOps Engineer Master Program

Simplilearn · Bangalore, India