Manikandan Krishnan

About

Infrastructure/Platform-focused engineering leader who led a large-scale AWS modernization, standardizing Terraform IaC and embedding security/policy validation into CI/CD to reduce drift and improve auditability. Also delivered data reliability improvements by incrementally migrating key integrations to an event-driven Kafka model with DLQs and lag monitoring, and has hands-on incident leadership using observability tooling (New Relic).

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Designed and implemented standardized AWS reference architecture and Terraform IaC across environments
• Modernized legacy manually provisioned infrastructure; reduced configuration drift and improved security posture
• Built CI/CD security/policy validation gates for infrastructure changes
• Strong Terraform PR review discipline (state management, IAM least privilege, module reuse, tagging/naming standards)
• Translates technical initiatives into business outcomes (audit risk reduction, faster onboarding, fewer vulnerabilities)
• Turns ambiguous stakeholder problems into measurable deliverables (latency/correctness/ownership framing; defined “done” via metrics)
• Event-driven migration experience with Kafka (incremental migration, DLQ, lag monitoring) improving data reliability
• Owned production incident end-to-end (Kafka lag); stabilized, identified root cause, optimized processing/schema/retries, added preventive guardrails
• Player-coach leadership with ongoing technical depth via PRs, architecture working sessions, incident participation, and metrics reviews
• Structured people management (bi-weekly 1:1s, behavior-based feedback, underperformance turnaround, stretch assignments tied to promotion criteria)