Hi, I'm Tilak
Tilakraj Desai
Lead DevOps at Emergent
Specializing in Cloud Technologies, Automation & Observability Engineering
01. About Me
Dedicated DevOps Engineer with over 5+ years of experience in cloud technologies, automation, and observability engineering. Expertise in Kubernetes cluster administration, service deployment, AWS, GCP, and Terraform.
I'm Tilak (Tilakraj Desai), and throughout my career at companies like Emergent, Zepto, and Groww, I've built and scaled infrastructure handling massive telemetry volumes. At tilakraj.cv, I share my expertise in creating cost-effective, highly available solutions that empower development teams and optimize operational efficiency.
Contact Info
B.Tech (Information Technology)
Dharmsinh Desai University
August 2016 - May 2020
02. Work Experience
DevOps Lead
Emergent.sh
Built and lead a lean team of 4 engineers owning the full platform footprint
Operate 30+ Kubernetes clusters along with databases and networking across regions
Designed and rolled out a multi-cloud setup spanning multiple providers
Led ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance programs end-to-end
Owned key parts of the platform security posture
Built an internal serverless platform for product teams
Eliminated regional single points of failure to make the platform truly highly available
Built unidirectional tunnels for secure communication between on-premise and cloud environments
Set up in-house observability serving both internal teams and external customers
Established best practices for IaC, security, scaling, and CI/CD across the org
Solved advanced sandboxing problems for running AI agents safely at scale
Solved noisy-neighbor egress network issues in densely bin-packed container environments
Drove cost optimization via event-based scale-down of customer environments
Set up ephemeral environments to enable fast, isolated testing for engineering teams
Senior DevOps Engineer
Zepto
Senior DevOps Engineer
Groww
SRE
OutSystems
SRE
Crest Data Systems
03. Skills & Technologies
Cloud Platforms
Orchestration
Observability
Infrastructure as Code
Automation
Tools & More
04. Featured Projects
In-house Observability Platform
Built comprehensive observability platforms to support massive telemetry volumes and optimize operational costs, reducing reliance on SaaS tools.
Distributed Tracing Solution
Engineered distributed tracing using Grafana Tempo to improve developer workflows and enable faster bottleneck identification.
Event-based Workload Scaling
Introduced event-based workload scaling in Kubernetes using KEDA for enhanced responsiveness and optimized resource utilization.
Self-service Alerting Platform
Re-designed alerting platform to enable developers to manage their own alerts, improving autonomy and reducing operational overhead.
Infrastructure Cost Optimization
Created Python/Lambda automation to flag and delete unused infrastructure, achieving significant cost savings.
05. Featured Blog Post
Migration from Thanos to Grafana Mimir
Deep dive into our journey of migrating metrics infrastructure for improved scalability and cost efficiency.
More articles coming soon...
06. Open Source
Selected contributions to upstream projects I rely on at work.
Contributor
OpenTelemetry compile-time auto-instrumentation for Go. Contributed gRPC status-code attribute extraction for RPC metrics instrumentation, including the implementation, unit tests, and metrics-conversion wiring.
- ▹Added rpc.grpc.status_code attribute to gRPC metrics instrumentation
- ▹Authored test suite covering success, gRPC errors, non-gRPC errors and non-gRPC systems
- ▹Updated rpc metrics conversion map to surface the new attribute
Contributor
Multiple fixes and feature additions across community Helm charts to improve reliability, configurability, and day-2 operability for downstream operators.
- ▹Shipped bug fixes and feature PRs in widely-used community Helm charts
- ▹Improved chart configurability and upgrade safety for production users
06. Get In Touch
Contact Information
I'm always interested in hearing about new opportunities, collaborations, or just connecting with fellow engineers. Feel free to reach out!