VP Platform Engineering · HDFC Bank
Hi, I'm Ashish.
Engineering Leader · Platform Builder · Photographer
I lead platform engineering for banking systems serving 100M+ customers — building Kubernetes-based infrastructure, observability platforms, and workflow orchestration. Off the clock, I chase candid moments through a camera lens.
13+
Years in Tech
250+
Engineers Influenced
100M+
Customers Served
4
Platform Products Built
What I do
A few domains where I spend most of my time and energy.
Engineering Leadership
VP-level leadership across platform engineering. Hiring, technical strategy, architecture governance, and building high-performance teams at scale.
Platform Products
Built Kaarya (workflow orchestration), Drishti (observability), and Dhairya (resiliency DevX) — platforms used by 100M+ customer banking systems.
Photography
Portrait, candid, and indoor photography. Finding the unguarded moment — the same discipline as reading a production incident.
Home Lab
GitOps-driven home server with 15+ self-hosted services — Cloudflare tunnels, Tailscale VPN, Terraform IaC. Infrastructure as a weekend hobby.
Platform products
In-house platforms built at HDFC Bank — powering the infrastructure that serves 100M+ banking customers. Each product carries a Sanskrit name that reflects its purpose.
Kaarya
Work · कार्यEnterprise-grade workflow orchestration platform built on Temporal, enabling complex, long-running banking processes with durability, visibility, and fault tolerance at scale.
Drishti
Vision · दृष्टिIn-house observability platform powered by OpenTelemetry. Unified traces, metrics, and logs across 100M+ customer journeys — reducing annual tooling costs from $1.2M to $300K.
Dhairya
Resilience · धैर्यResiliency DevX toolkit providing automated failover orchestration and chaos engineering primitives for Aerospike and YugabyteDB. Reduces MTTR and enables teams to build for failure.
Observability Platform
API Intelligence & OperationsCross-team observability initiative covering API reviews, user journey identification, key request earmarking, and operational dashboards and alerting for mission-critical banking flows.
Experience
13 years across banking, fintech, retail, and enterprise.
Vice President – Platform Engineering
HDFC Bank
Aug 2023 – Present
Bengaluru, India
Leading platform engineering for banking systems serving 100M+ customers. Managing 20+ direct reports and influencing a 250+ engineer organisation with a $1–5M annual budget. Driving Kubernetes-based vendor-neutral platform modernisation focused on resiliency, disaster recovery, and observability. Built in-house observability platform using OpenTelemetry, reducing annual tooling costs from $1.2M to $300K. Own hiring strategy, performance management, architecture reviews, and technology governance across regulated banking platforms.
Engineering Manager, Machine Learning
Foray Software (Contract – Wayfair)
May 2023 – Aug 2023
Remote, India
Led machine learning engineering for retail analytics at Wayfair scale — a 5M × 1B SKU matching and competitive pricing intelligence system. Partnered with data science, platform, and product to improve model reliability, scalability, and deployment processes.
Senior Manager, Cybersecurity Engineering
PayPal
Mar 2019 – Apr 2023
Bengaluru, India
Progressed from MTS1 → MTS2 → Senior Manager over 4 years. Led cybersecurity engineering teams building identity, fraud, and trust infrastructure for PayPal's global payments platform. Drove engineering excellence, cross-team collaboration, and compliance delivery across regulated markets.
Senior Software Engineer
Walmart Labs
Oct 2017 – Mar 2019
Bengaluru, India
Built large-scale data platform services for Walmart's supply chain and retail analytics. Worked on high-throughput distributed systems using Spark, Kafka, and Hadoop.
Senior Developer
Barclaycard
Mar 2015 – Oct 2017
Pune, India
Led data modernisation on the Hadoop ecosystem, acquiring multi-format vendor data (JSON, EBCDIC, ASCII) into the data lake. Won the Barclaycard ML Hackathon (Social Scoring Engine) and Privacy Hackathon.
Application Developer
Cisco Systems
Aug 2012 – Mar 2015
Bengaluru, India
Application developer in sales crediting and compensation, working on Oracle E-Business Suite OIC modules and independent Java/Oracle DB applications.
B.Tech, Information Technology · VJTI Mumbai · 2008–2012
Expertise
Skills accumulated across engineering, leadership, and creative work.
Engineering Leadership
Platform Engineering
Software & Data
Photography
Infrastructure as a hobby
My home server runs a GitOps-driven stack of 15+ self-hosted services — Immich for photos, Jellyfin for media, Vaultwarden for secrets — all exposed securely via Cloudflare Tunnels. Every deployment is a Git commit. Every DNS record is Terraform-managed.
- ›Custom GitOps agent polls Git and applies Docker Compose stacks on every commit
- ›Cloudflare Tunnel + Traefik for zero-port-forward public exposure with TLS everywhere
- ›Tailscale mesh VPN for private access to internal-only services across all devices
- ›Terraform manages Cloudflare DNS, tunnel ingress rules, and Zero Trust access policies
- ›15+ self-hosted services: photos, media, passwords, files, notes, and home automation
$ docker ps --format "table {{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}" NAMES STATUS traefik Up 2 days tailscale Up 2 days cloudflared Up 2 days immich-server Up 2 days jellyfin Up 2 days vaultwarden Up 2 days postgres Up 2 days redis Up 2 days kopia Up 2 days syncthing Up 2 days esphome Up 2 days watchtower Up 2 days
ab18.in · Cloudflare Tunnel · Traefik
Stack
Recent writing
Thoughts on engineering, leadership, and building.
Filing My ITR-2 Using Claude Code — CA Attested It!
I used Claude Code and a community-built ITR filing skill to prepare my own ITR-2 with foreign assets — reconciling Form 16, AIS, 26AS, and broker P&L in an afternoon instead of days. A CA reviewed the final numbers and confirmed everything was correct.
From Passwords to Passkeys: Replacing oauth2-proxy with webauthn-proxy
My home lab used oauth2-proxy backed by an OIDC provider for years. Here's why I ripped it out and replaced it with a passkey-only forward-auth proxy — and how the migration went.
Running a GitOps Home Lab: Infrastructure as a Weekend Hobby
My home server runs 15+ self-hosted services managed entirely via Git commits. Here's the architecture, the stack, and why I think everyone in tech should have a home lab.
Through the lens
Portraits, candid moments, and indoor light.
Let's talk
Platform engineering, photography, or building something interesting — I'm always up for a good conversation.
Say hello