Manoj Kalakoti is an experienced Senior DevOps Engineer with a strong background in architecting and scaling distributed systems that support high-traffic, mission-critical applications. He has led site reliability efforts across cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP, designing resilient and geo-redundant infrastructures using Terraform and Kubernetes to maintain service uptime. His work emphasizes automation, observability, and system reliability, with hands-on expertise in deploying tools like Prometheus and Grafana for real-time monitoring and capacity planning.
Since 2020, Manoj has worked at Apple Inc. in Austin, TX, where he has contributed to multiple initiatives, including the migration of over 30 applications to Kubernetes, the adoption of containerization best practices, and the implementation of cost-saving strategies that reduced wasteful resource allocation. He has led small SRE teams through on-call rotations, developed runbooks and playbooks, and collaborated with security and product teams to define service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level indicators (SLIs), and error budgets. His efforts have led to significant improvements in scalability, system throughput, and customer satisfaction metrics.
Before Apple, Manoj worked at ADP in Roseland, NJ, as a Design Engineer focused on Container-as-a-Service (CaaS). He helped design container platforms using Kubernetes, Docker, and managed services like AWS EKS and Azure AKS. He contributed to the scalability and usability of ADP’s Workforce Now payroll platform, led the implementation of CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins, GitLab CI, and ArgoCD, and collaborated with UX and product teams to improve customer workflows and reduce support overhead.
Earlier in his career, he held DevOps Engineering roles at Ordusion Technologies and Veridic Solutions in Cleveland, OH, where he managed production systems, implemented auto-scaling and observability tools, and automated operational processes using Bash, Python, and Ansible. His career began at Crystalite Technologies in Hyderabad, India, where he worked as a Junior Build & Release Engineer for a healthcare management system. There, he supported build automation using Jenkins, Docker, and GitHub Actions, and contributed to containerization, deployment, and release management for Java and Node.js applications.
Manoj earned his Master of Science in Industrial Management from Texas A&M University at Kingsville and his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Kakinada. His technical strengths span CI/CD, Kubernetes, AWS, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and cloud security, and he is known for his focus on system efficiency, automation, and cross-functional collaboration.