Hamburg, Germany · CKA certified

Suraj Mookola builds platforms teams can ship on.

Platform engineer with 10+ years in software and backend engineering. I move workloads onto Kubernetes, run delivery through GitOps, and set up the observability and on-call practice that keeps production calm.

Get in touch LinkedIn

engineer.yamlapiVersion: people/v1

kind: PlatformEngineer
metadata:
  name: suraj-mookola
  labels:
    location: hamburg-de
    cert: cka-2025
spec:
  focus:
    - kubernetes-migrations
    - gitops-and-ci-cd
    - observability-and-sre
    - access-and-security
  tooling: [k8s, flux, terraform,
            ansible, grafana, otel, k6]
  rollback: 2m   # and it's been tested

10+ yrsbuilding software and platforms

FinOpsCost optimization: legacy VMs retired, infrastructure spend cut

SREIncident management, runbooks, SLOs, P99 latency

VMs → K8sCore services, messaging and caching migrated

Platform work · Sdui, 2024–present

What I built as a platform engineer

At Sdui, a school communication platform, I'm taking core services off virtual machines and onto Kubernetes, rebuilt delivery around GitOps, and made incidents shorter and rarer.

Kubernetes migration

containers · clusters · parity

Containerized the core application services for production
Moved the main backend, its queues and messaging onto Kubernetes
Took the remaining services and Redis off VMs
Brought the preproduction cluster to parity with production

CI/CD and GitOps

github · monorepo · flux

Led the source and pipeline migration from GitLab to GitHub
Unified frontend and backend services into one monorepo
Streamlined Flux image update automation
Added per-domain manual deploy triggers

Reliability and observability

sre · on-call · tracing

Wrote the incident response strategy and runbooks
Correlated alerts with application metrics
Cut rollback to two minutes; shipped Kubernetes logs
Added distributed tracing and fixed Sentry lag and 504s

Security, performance and cost

oidc · iam · kms · k6

KMS-backed chat encryption, with automatic failover
Kubernetes OIDC access and IAM for RabbitMQ
k6 load testing, including Redis at 500k+ jobs
Decommissioned legacy storage VMs to cut cost

Experience

From backend developer to platform engineer

I spent a decade shipping application code before moving into platform work, so I build infrastructure with the developer on the other end in mind.

Dec 2024 – PresentHamburg (remote)

Platform Engineer

Sdui

Ran the VM-to-Kubernetes migration and the GitLab-to-GitHub move with a Flux GitOps rollout
Built the SRE practice: alert correlation, runbooks, two-minute rollbacks
Introduced k6 load testing, log shipping, tracing, OIDC access and KMS failover

Apr 2023 – Nov 2024Germany (hybrid)

Senior Backend Developer

Sdui

Integrated partners into the platform and drove decisions through ADRs
Advised on and configured APM monitoring and alerting
Helped turn the product into a solution-provider platform

Apr 2021 – Mar 2023Hamburg (hybrid)

Backend Developer

ABOUT YOU

Maintained the merchant platform for products, stock and orders
Built message-oriented middleware on AWS SQS; ran webhooks, queues and jobs

Mar 2017 – Mar 2021Dubai, UAE

Senior Full Stack Developer

MJB Golf

Designed the full-stack architecture, versioned APIs and deployments
Built web applications with PHP, jQuery and Angular

2013 – 2017Dubai and Ernakulam

Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer

DigitalMesh, Golf in Dubai

Owned the full development life cycle, from specs to deployment
Led in-house web and mobile projects and their architecture

Skills

Tools I work with

Strongest in Kubernetes, GitOps and observability, with a backend background in PHP and messaging systems.

Orchestration	KubernetesDockerFlux
Infrastructure as code	TerraformAnsible
Cloud and infra	OpenStackAWSGCP
Observability	GrafanaOpenTelemetryCoralogixSentry
CI/CD	GitHub ActionsGitLab CIGitOpsk6
Security	OIDCIAMKMS
Data and messaging	RedisRabbitMQSQSMySQL
Backend	PHPLaravelSymfonyREST

Certifications and education

Credentials

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

CNCF · December 2025

Google Cloud Infrastructure

Coursera, 3 courses · 2020
Google Cloud Essentials, Qwiklabs · 2020

B.C.A. Computer Science

Bharathiar University · 2009–2012

Contact

Let's talk about your platform.

The best way to reach me is LinkedIn. I'm happy to compare notes on Kubernetes migrations, GitOps and SRE.

LinkedInin/suraj-ms