SAYAJI CHAVAN

Technical Skills

Professional Experience

• Owned the end-to-end provisioning of an ML Sandbox platform on AWS SageMaker. Configured VPC isolation, custom Docker images, RBAC through IAM policies, and least-privilege Jupyter access for data scientists working with customer PII.
• Managed multiple team members and customer cloud accounts, ensuring smooth operations and the successful execution of projects.
• Built a serverless document processing service using Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, SNS, Bedrock, and Textract with AWS CDK. Wrote the Lambda functions, DynamoDB table schemas, and API Gateway routing.
• Wrote and maintained Infrastructure as Code across multiple AWS accounts using Terraform and CDK. Handled provider upgrades, drift remediation, and built a reusable Code Accelerator to speed up provisioning for the team.
• Ran EKS cluster upgrades from 1.30 to 1.32 (including the move to Amazon Linux 2023), migrated ElastiCache from Redis to Valkey, and rightsized RDS instances provisioned through Terraform.
• Built observability dashboards in New Relic using CDK. Covered SQS queues, Step Functions, Lambda, and API Gateway with alerting tied to SLOs so the team could catch issues before customers did.
• Handled on-call rotations. Triaged production incidents using CloudWatch, Site24x7, and New Relic, wrote blameless postmortems, and pushed fixes to reduce MTTR.
• Led patch management for Docker Auth CVE . Updated AMIs across all 100+ production nodes in Dev, QA, and Production and coordinated rollouts with the team.
• Worked with ClearDATA on compliance remediation. Deployed SSO roles, enforced secret rotation, encrypted SNS topics, and closed findings from non-compliance reports.
• Deployed AWS GuardDuty, Config, Security Hub, and WAF for proactive threat detection, compliance enforcement, and application-layer protection. Integrated Lambda to send real-time alerts to Slack for faster incident response.
• Ran regular container and codebase scans using Trivy, Snyk, and OWASP ZAP to catch and fix security vulnerabilities across the CI/CD pipeline.
• Reduced EKS operational costs by 60-70% by automating scale-downs during off-hours and leveraging Spot instances for non-critical workloads.
• Supported the client's data pipeline operations by working with Apache Airflow for workflow orchestration and task scheduling.

• As Module Lead, built a POC for a high-throughput event-driven architecture handling 5,000 concurrent bus tracking updates per minute using distributed message queues and microservices. Achieved sub-second data propagation across environments.
• Modernized a legacy healthcare platform backend using FastAPI with full unit test coverage. Cut form processing time in half and reduced maintenance costs by roughly 40%.
• Built the backend for a FinTech platform running on ECS with RDS and OpenSearch. The system handled 1000+ active users daily with event-driven processing through SQS and Lambda.
• Developed microservices for an EdTech portal admin panel with RESTful APIs, PostgreSQL database design with indexing strategies, and participated in Agile ceremonies throughout the project lifecycle.
• Worked across the full stack of project phases: provisioning cloud infrastructure through Terraform, designing API specifications, building efficient database schemas, and developing scalable APIs.
• Provisioned the full AWS infrastructure for a large-scale Super App from scratch using Terraform and CDK. VPC subnetting, compute, databases, load balancing, the works.
• Migrated all databases from ElephantSQL to Amazon RDS across Dev, QA, QA2, and Production. Handled backups, wrote migration scripts, and validated data after each zero-downtime cutover.
• Designed the first version of the Data Science Sandbox on SageMaker. Configured VPC endpoints, S3 buckets, and least-privilege IAM roles so it worked securely without internet access.
• Automated PostgreSQL provisioning with Terraform. Before this, every new database was manually onboarded across environments.
• Set up CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and AWS CodePipeline using blue-green deployments for zero-downtime releases.
• Implemented Semantic Release automation from scratch using GitHub Actions for consistent versioning and changelog generation. Integrated with CI/CD pipelines, version control, and container registries for seamless deployments.
• Ran containerized workloads on Docker and Kubernetes in production. Debugged ECS task scheduling, fixed node failures, and handled pod orchestration to keep services running.

Certifications & Education