Hello, I’m Anand K M

Software Engineer building reliable cloud platforms.

I work in Platform Engineering and DevOps at H&R Block India, operating Azure Kubernetes platforms and improving how teams build, release, and support cloud-native services.

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Open to global opportunities in Platform Engineering, DevOps, SRE, and Kubernetes.

15Kubernetes clusters supported

~60services across production environments

20%build-failure reduction across 9 releases

About Me

Focused on dependable software delivery.

I am a Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering and DevOps team at H&R Block India, with around three years of experience building and operating cloud-native delivery systems.

My work focuses on Azure Kubernetes Service, Istio service-mesh routing, Helm-managed workloads, Terraform/TFE infrastructure provisioning, and Azure DevOps CI/CD. I support 6 production and 9 non-production clusters running roughly 60 services across 6 application namespaces, plus dedicated Istio system and ingress namespaces.

I am most interested in the operational problems behind reliable software delivery: safe releases, failure isolation, incident response, observability, and reducing repetitive work for engineering teams.

I recently completed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification. I am exploring AI infrastructure, including Kubernetes-based inference platforms, GPU scheduling, and LLM serving. These are current learning areas, not claims of production AI infrastructure experience.

Experience

Production ownership and measurable improvements.

My progression and contributions within the Platform Engineering and DevOps team.

Jul 2025 - presentH&R Block India Pvt. Ltd.Trivandrum, IN

Software Engineer · Platform Engineering & DevOps

Promoted from Associate Software Engineer. Current focus: platform operations, delivery automation, service mesh, and incident response.

Owned: build/release and deployment management, automation scripts, and infrastructure provisioning via TFE.
Operated: 6 production and 9 non-production Kubernetes clusters, covering upgrades, troubleshooting, deployments, Istio, monitoring, scaling, security updates, networking, backup/DR, and infrastructure provisioning.
Protected: configured Istio DestinationRules, outlier detection, consecutive-error thresholds, ejection duration, timeouts, and retries so unhealthy external services fail fast instead of delaying dependent services. Datadog and Application Insights comparisons across several releases showed lower response delays and fewer incidents.
Responded: acted as an incident responder for high-severity outages, diagnosing downtime and restoring service within stated SLAs.
Automated: replaced legacy tasks, resolved dependency/version issues, improved validation, automated certificate deployment, and added retry handling across approximately 65 pipelines, reducing build failures by 20% over nine releases.

Jul 2023 - Jul 2025H&R Block India Pvt. Ltd.Trivandrum, IN

Associate Software Engineer

Joined the Platform Engineering team and built a foundation in release engineering and Kubernetes operations.

Built: Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines and monitored pipeline failures.
Deployed: containerized applications to AKS and other Kubernetes platforms using Helm.
Improved: pipeline performance and legacy delivery tasks while documenting installation and deployment workflows.

Selected Projects

Work that shows how I solve platform problems.

Production systems, internal proof-of-concepts, and personal labs are labelled clearly.

production experienceflagship case study

Blue-Green Release Pipeline

Namespace-level isolation and Istio VirtualService routing for zero-downtime releases, with a Traffic Controller pipeline handling APIM / ORP and shared-service integration.

Problem: release riskOwnership: pipeline and routing workResult: zero-downtime strategy

internal POCAI-assisted operations

AI DevOps Assistant

Teams-native assistant built with n8n and Azure OpenAI to answer infrastructure questions, query deployments and monitoring, trigger approved pipelines and automation, restart workloads, create incidents, and check certificate expiry.

Users: 5 DevOps + 2 application support engineersControls: read-only default, allowlisted actions, manual approvalOutcome: team-estimated reduction in repetitive work and faster troubleshooting

n8nAzure OpenAIMS Teams

production experienceoperations

Multi-Cluster AKS Operations

Day-two operations for 6 production and 9 non-production clusters, supporting roughly 60 services across 6 application namespaces plus dedicated Istio system and ingress namespaces.

Scope: upgrades, deployments, scaling, monitoring, networkingReliability: incident response, security updates, backup/DR

KubernetesHelmDatadog

personal labAI inference trajectory

LLM Routing on Kubernetes

Used an Apple M4 Mac and Kind to explore Ollama/Qwen, vLLM, LLM-D, and Kubernetes inference patterns. Successfully tested routing requests between model-serving pods.

Tested: pod-level request routingInfrastructure-limited: prefill/decode, load-based, and model-aware routing

KindOllamaQwenvLLMLLM-D

Skills

Technologies I use to deliver and operate systems.

Grouped by production use, project work, and current learning.

Production experience

used at work

Azure, AKS, Kubernetes, Istio, Helm, Terraform/TFE, Azure DevOps, Docker, Linux, NGINX, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, App Insights, DNS, load balancing, Git, and Azure DevOps Repos.

Project experience

built or explored

n8n, Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Teams workflows, blue-green traffic control, service-mesh circuit breakers, certificate deployment automation, and Azure Static Web Apps.

Personal AI infrastructure lab

non-production

Apple M4, Kind, Ollama with Qwen, vLLM, LLM-D, and Kubernetes inference routing. Pod-level request routing was tested successfully; more advanced routing experiments were constrained by local infrastructure.

Credentials & Recognition

Qualifications beyond the project work.

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

2026

Passed the CKA exam on August 13, 2026. Certificate ID: LF-3qjoxr4me.

Spot Recognition

2025

Recognized for owning and implementing an Istio Circuit Breaker feature.

Technopark Chess Champion

2026

Won the Prathidhwani Games 2026 chess tournament.

Contact

Let’s discuss your platform challenges.

Open to Platform Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure opportunities.

Email is the best way to reach me. You can also review my professional profile.

Email Anand LinkedIn

Emailanand.km.devops@gmail.comOpen toGlobal opportunitiesGitHubgithub.com/anandkmcloud