AASHISH CHHABRA

Senior Lead Engineer · Data & Platform

12+ Years·1,200+ Servers·19 PB Data

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About

Infrastructure at scale, made reliable.

I architect and operate data infrastructure at scale.

From bare-metal Cloudera clusters spanning 400+ nodes to cloud-native OpenShift platforms, I've spent 12+ years turning complex infrastructure challenges into reliable, observable systems.

Currently at Airtel (Xtelify), I lead a team of 3 Java developers and 5 DevOps engineers, drive the move of an internal data mesh platform to Airtel B2B Cloud alongside product and engineering managers, and own container security across every containerised deployment and its CI/CD pipeline.

Based in Gurugram · Open to senior engineering and engineering leadership roles globally.

Beyond The Title

Architect, leader, and still an IC.

Three roles I run in parallel, not in sequence.

Architect
  • Drives the data mesh platform's move to Airtel B2B Cloud — working with product managers and engineering managers across teams, owning the majority of the solutioning without being the sole owner
  • Cross-layer design work with Nxtra (Airtel Data Centre) infra, network, and storage architects on new B2B Cloud services
  • Owns container security architecture across every containerised deployment and its CI/CD pipeline
  • Closes FRDs with product managers and writes the HLD/LLD docs for the services I personally design
Leader
  • Leads a team of 3 Java developers and 5 DevOps engineers
  • Drives the CI/CD strategy directly with the DevOps reportees
  • Runs a dedicated pod — 3 developers, 1 DevOps engineer — building new Airtel B2B Cloud services
  • Mentors DevOps engineers on peer teams too — production issues, scaling problems, career growth
  • Selected by leadership for the Management Development Programme at IIM Indore to sharpen people-management capability
Individual Contributor
  • Works directly with the Java devs — pairing with Copilot, Cursor, and Claude to fix issues, close gaps between code and FRDs, and review PRs
  • Hands-on in enhancing the CI/CD framework itself, not just prescribing it
  • Still does the actual solutioning and design work, not just reviewing it from above
  • Envisions what the on-prem apps and data mesh platform need to become B2B-Cloud-ready

Even this site is one of those projects — a weekend build with Claude, used as a hands-on way to learn what good agentic-AI practice actually looks like. Poke around the Command Center for more.

Ops Console

Command Center

A real shell, not a screenshot. Try help to see what it can do, or jump straight to whoami, stack kafka, experience xtelify.

simulated telemetry, for illustration — not live production data

guest@aashishc.dev — ops-console
guest@aashishc.dev:~$

Commands: help whoami ls experience stack projects credentials contact clear

Career

Timeline

Drag to scrub through 12 years of infrastructure work.

2014 2018 2019 2023 Now

Datanodes on the Xtelify Cloudera cluster 20
Toolbox

Tech Stack

Big Data
Cloudera CDH/CDP HDP Apache Kafka Apache Hive SQOOP Spark Operator Trino YARN Zookeeper Apache Airflow
DevOps
Ansible Jenkins CI/CD Pluggable CI/CD Framework BlackDuck Coverity Prisma Cloud GitOps
Cloud
OpenShift (OCP) Kubernetes Docker Swarm Docker Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Platform Airtel Cloud
Observability
Elastic Stack (ELK) Elasticsearch APM Fleet Synthetics Grafana Kafka UI OpenTelemetry
Languages
Python Pandas Shell Scripting MySQL Oracle SQL JupyterHub Cluster Shell
System
RHEL/CentOS 7–8 Kernel Tuning Systemd RPM/TAR Packaging Bare Metal
Highlights

Impact

Click any card to see what actually shipped.

Grew the production Cloudera platform from a 20-node cluster to 400+ Datanodes carrying 19 PB, while running annual capacity planning and disaster recovery to keep it stable through the climb.

Datanodes20

Planned and executed the CDH 5.8 → CDP 7.1.6 upgrade in lockstep with Developers and Operations, migrating every data processing job with zero business downtime.

Designed and stabilised a Kafka platform for Airtel — dual Kerberos/SCRAM authentication, kernel-tuned bare-metal brokers built to carry high-speed streaming traffic from across India, Cruise Control for rebalancing, and real-time observability via Grafana, Kafka UI, and Telegram alerting.

Read the full case study ↗

Led the move of in-house applications and microservices off Docker Swarm and onto OpenShift Container Platform, standardising CI/CD and automation for the team along the way.

Built and upgraded a complete Elastic Stack — centralised logging, APM tracing, Fleet-managed agents, and Synthetics — giving every platform and application a single pane of glass.

Built and maintained a pluggable CI/CD framework supporting multiple languages, with DevSecOps checks (BlackDuck, Coverity, Prisma Cloud) enforced as mandatory pipeline gates — not optional steps a developer could skip.

Credentials

Certifications & Recognition

IIM Indore
Management Development Programme
2024
Microsoft
Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
2024
Hortonworks
HDP Certified Developer
2017
Airtel / Xtelify
  • Employee of the Month
  • Eureka Award
  • Best Team Award
Tech Mahindra
  • ACE Award (consistent excellence)
  • Bravo Award (two quarters)
  • Highest Learner Award
  • Pat on the Back Award
  • Best Team Award (two alternate quarters)

Let's build something reliable.

Open to senior engineering and leadership roles.

✍️ Technical Writing blog.aashishc.dev — coming soon
🎥 Video Walkthroughs coming soon