VP Platform Engineering · HDFC Bank
Hi, I'm Ashish.
Engineering Leader · Platform Builder · Photographer
I lead platform engineering for banking systems serving 100M+ customers — building Kubernetes-based infrastructure, observability platforms, and workflow orchestration. Off the clock, I chase candid moments through a camera lens.
13+
Years in Tech
250+
Engineers Influenced
100M+
Customers Served
4
Platform Products Built
What I do
A few domains where I spend most of my time and energy.
Engineering Leadership
VP-level leadership across platform engineering. Hiring, technical strategy, architecture governance, and building high-performance teams at scale.
Platform Products
Built Kaarya (workflow orchestration), Drishti (observability), and Dhairya (resiliency DevX) — platforms used by 100M+ customer banking systems.
Photography
Portrait, candid, and indoor photography. Finding the unguarded moment — the same discipline as reading a production incident.
Home Lab
GitOps-driven home server with 15+ self-hosted services — Cloudflare tunnels, Tailscale VPN, Terraform IaC. Infrastructure as a weekend hobby.
Platform products
In-house platforms built at HDFC Bank — powering the infrastructure that serves 100M+ banking customers. Each product carries a Sanskrit name that reflects its purpose.
Kaarya
Work · कार्यEnterprise-grade workflow orchestration platform built on Temporal, enabling complex, long-running banking processes with durability, visibility, and fault tolerance at scale.
Drishti
Vision · दृष्टिIn-house observability platform powered by OpenTelemetry. Unified traces, metrics, and logs across 100M+ customer journeys — reducing annual tooling costs from $1.2M to $300K.
Dhairya
Resilience · धैर्यResiliency DevX toolkit providing automated failover orchestration and chaos engineering primitives for Aerospike and YugabyteDB. Reduces MTTR and enables teams to build for failure.
Observability Platform
API Intelligence & OperationsCross-team observability initiative covering API reviews, user journey identification, key request earmarking, and operational dashboards and alerting for mission-critical banking flows.
Experience
13 years across banking, fintech, retail, and enterprise.
Vice President – Platform Engineering
HDFC Bank
Aug 2023 – Present
Bengaluru, India
Leading platform engineering for banking systems serving 100M+ customers. Managing 20+ direct reports and influencing a 250+ engineer organisation with a $1–5M annual budget. Driving Kubernetes-based vendor-neutral platform modernisation focused on resiliency, disaster recovery, and observability. Built in-house observability platform using OpenTelemetry, reducing annual tooling costs from $1.2M to $300K. Own hiring strategy, performance management, architecture reviews, and technology governance across regulated banking platforms.
Engineering Manager, Machine Learning
Foray Software (Contract – Wayfair)
May 2023 – Aug 2023
Remote, India
Led machine learning engineering for retail analytics at Wayfair scale — a 5M × 1B SKU matching and competitive pricing intelligence system. Partnered with data science, platform, and product to improve model reliability, scalability, and deployment processes.
Senior Manager, Cybersecurity Engineering
PayPal
Mar 2019 – Apr 2023
Bengaluru, India
Progressed from MTS1 → MTS2 → Senior Manager over 4 years. Led cybersecurity engineering teams building identity, fraud, and trust infrastructure for PayPal's global payments platform. Drove engineering excellence, cross-team collaboration, and compliance delivery across regulated markets.
Senior Software Engineer
Walmart Labs
Oct 2017 – Mar 2019
Bengaluru, India
Built large-scale data platform services for Walmart's supply chain and retail analytics. Worked on high-throughput distributed systems using Spark, Kafka, and Hadoop.
Senior Developer
Barclaycard
Mar 2015 – Oct 2017
Pune, India
Led data modernisation on the Hadoop ecosystem, acquiring multi-format vendor data (JSON, EBCDIC, ASCII) into the data lake. Won the Barclaycard ML Hackathon (Social Scoring Engine) and Privacy Hackathon.
Application Developer
Cisco Systems
Aug 2012 – Mar 2015
Bengaluru, India
Application developer in sales crediting and compensation, working on Oracle E-Business Suite OIC modules and independent Java/Oracle DB applications.
B.Tech, Information Technology · VJTI Mumbai · 2008–2012
Expertise
Skills accumulated across engineering, leadership, and creative work.
Engineering Leadership
Platform Engineering
Software & Data
Photography
Infrastructure as a hobby
My home server runs a GitOps-driven stack of 15+ self-hosted services — Immich for photos, Jellyfin for media, Vaultwarden for secrets — all exposed securely via Cloudflare Tunnels. Every deployment is a Git commit. Every DNS record is Terraform-managed.
- ›Custom GitOps agent polls Git and applies Docker Compose stacks on every commit
- ›Cloudflare Tunnel + Traefik for zero-port-forward public exposure with TLS everywhere
- ›Tailscale mesh VPN for private access to internal-only services across all devices
- ›Terraform manages Cloudflare DNS, tunnel ingress rules, and Zero Trust access policies
- ›15+ self-hosted services: photos, media, passwords, files, notes, and home automation
$ docker ps --format "table {{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}" NAMES STATUS traefik Up 2 days tailscale Up 2 days cloudflared Up 2 days immich-server Up 2 days jellyfin Up 2 days vaultwarden Up 2 days postgres Up 2 days redis Up 2 days kopia Up 2 days syncthing Up 2 days esphome Up 2 days watchtower Up 2 days
ab18.in · Cloudflare Tunnel · Traefik
Stack
Recent writing
Thoughts on engineering, leadership, and building.
Running a GitOps Home Lab: Infrastructure as a Weekend Hobby
My home server runs 15+ self-hosted services managed entirely via Git commits. Here's the architecture, the stack, and why I think everyone in tech should have a home lab.
Building High-Performance Engineering Teams
What separates a good engineering team from a great one isn't raw talent — it's the operating model, the feedback loops, and how leaders amplify individual contribution into collective output.
The Patience of Portrait Photography
Portrait and candid photography taught me something no architecture review could — how to read a room, wait for the right moment, and let go of the need to control the outcome.
Through the lens
Portraits, candid moments, and indoor light.
Let's talk
Platform engineering, photography, or building something interesting — I'm always up for a good conversation.
Say hello