Hi, I'm
18 yrs · 2 mo · 6 days building & operating production infrastructure at scale
Real results delivered through SRE practices, cloud automation, and platform engineering.
18 yrs · 2 mo · 6 days turning complex infrastructure into competitive advantage — from bare-metal HPC clusters to production-grade AI platforms on Kubernetes & AWS. I engineer the systems that make AI actually work at scale: low-latency LLM inference, MLOps pipelines, and cloud-native platforms built to survive real production pressure.
I started my career in high-performance computing — working with IBM AIX, PowerVM, PowerHA, and GPFS on IBM Power Systems and Bull ESCALA servers. Managing bare-metal HPC clusters, optimising low-latency workloads, and ensuring high availability under extreme load taught me what it truly means to engineer for performance and resilience at scale.
Over the last several years, I've evolved into cloud-native engineering — building scalable infrastructure on AWS with Terraform and Kubernetes, modernising CI/CD pipelines, and automating workflows with Python. At Redwood Software, I've led migrations from Docker Swarm to Amazon EKS, architected cloud-native deployments, and implemented observability stacks with Prometheus and Grafana.
Now I'm focused on the intersection of DevOps and AI — specifically MLOps and LLMOps — operationalising large language models and building production-ready, low-latency AI inference platforms that actually scale.
Pipelines are not just for apps — the same principles apply across infrastructure, models, and data.
High-impact professional work spanning cloud platforms, SRE, and systems engineering
Brought in to lead the migration of RunMyJob (RMJ/RMF) — Redwood's flagship SaaS workload automation product — from a production Docker Swarm platform to EKS. Began by taking full ownership of the legacy infrastructure to deeply understand its application architecture, services, and networking — the foundation required to design the EKS target state.
uv and linting to ruffEstablished SRE culture across the organisation, reducing system downtime by 20% through structured incident response frameworks and modernising legacy automation.
Led a 7-person team managing production-critical AIX 5.3 on IBM Power 5 for a leading German telecom operator's UK subsidiary — with zero vendor support, as the market had moved on to IBM Power 8.
Designed and built a Jenkins-based CI/CD pipeline in Groovy for a leading US airline's shop-and-purchase web application, hosted on IBM WebSphere across a 5-node cluster with DR and Production environments.
Delivered a self-service AWS provisioning platform for a UK financial regulatory authority's data science team — enabling data scientists to request ad hoc EC2 environments for experimentation without infrastructure team involvement.
Architected and delivered a greenfield HPC-class infrastructure for a leading UK manufacturer — from bare-metal networking and high-performance SAN storage through to parallel filesystem and clustered database deployment. The same technology stack (GPFS, high-density Power nodes, HA clustering) underpins modern AI and HPC compute clusters.
Continuous learning and experimentation with modern DevOps and MLOps practices
Personal POC implementing a complete, industry-standard MLOps lifecycle — built and operated as a production-grade pipeline from the ground up using Databricks and Spark.
A Streamlit-based shopping cart app with an embedded AI chatbot — users browse products and converse with a bot in the same interface. Built with a dual-database RAG architecture and wrapped in a production-grade, security-enforced CI/CD pipeline.
Exploring IaC-driven deployment of HPC infrastructure using AWS ParallelCluster — with Kubernetes and the Slurm operator (SlinkyProject) running on top. Also evaluating Floci as a complementary tool in the HPC orchestration space.
Personal POC building a local Kubernetes cluster with kind to demonstrate end-to-end observability — covering metrics, logs, traces, GitOps, and service mesh on a single cluster. No GPU workloads; purely focused on cloud-native observability patterns.
kind as a lightweight, reproducible environmentkind cluster using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, ArgoCD, and Istio service meshCloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
Amazon Web Services
IT Service Management
CloudBees / Jenkins
IBM / Docker
Scrum Alliance
DevOps Institute
Python Institute
IBM
Red Hat
IBM
IBM
IBM
Duke University / Coursera
I have seen Nikhil as the utmost proactive DevOps Architect and forward thinker. Many times he has been a great technical consultant for me as a reference point. He is really a premium asset for the team.
Nikhil is a Great Guy, wonderful person to work with. He can be a Gem in any Organisation.
Tech savvy, self-motivated professional with a strong drive to deliver results.
I had the pleasure of working closely with Nikhil on several projects, and I can confidently say he is an exceptional colleague. His ability to collaborate effectively, communicate clearly, and bring creative solutions to challenges made a significant impact on our team's success. Nikhil consistently demonstrated reliability and dedication, ensuring tasks were completed on time and with high quality. Beyond his professional skills, he brought positivity and encouragement to the workplace, making him a valued team member and a joy to work with.
I had the pleasure of managing Nikhil at Cognizant, where we worked together on the UK's leading payment gateway project, based at the client's Basildon, UK office. Nikhil is a technically strong engineer with solid hands-on experience in Kubernetes infrastructure and performance tuning. During our time together, we worked extensively on tuning an on-prem Kubernetes cluster setup, and Nikhil consistently showed great ownership, a methodical approach to problem-solving, and a collaborative attitude under pressure. I would strongly recommend Nikhil to any team looking for a skilled and dependable infrastructure engineer.
I worked closely with Nikhil in the Cloud SRE team at Santander, and he was instrumental in maintaining the stability of our cloud infrastructure. Nikhil was a driving force behind our CI/CD improvements and cloud-native transitions and has a deep understanding of the SRE philosophy — moving beyond manual intervention to build scalable, automated solutions. He played a key role in reducing toil and improving our system observability. His ability to handle high-pressure incidents with a calm, analytical approach makes him an invaluable asset to any platform or reliability engineering team.
Nikhil is an exceptional platform engineer and a fantastic colleague. He possesses a rare, deep understanding of both legacy high-performance computing and modern cloud-native AI infrastructure. Whether he is migrating complex workloads to Amazon EKS or architecting production-ready LLM platforms, Nikhil delivers flawless execution. I highly recommend him to any organization looking to scale their DevOps and AI capabilities.
I had the pleasure of working with Nikhil for a couple of years at Cognizant on the FCA engagement. He is an outstanding DevOps Engineer with strong expertise in AWS Cloud technologies. Alongside his technical capabilities, Nikhil consistently demonstrates excellent teamwork, reliability, and a high level of trustworthiness. These qualities truly set him apart and make him a valuable asset to any team.
I had the pleasure of working with Nikhil, and it was a great experience collaborating with him. He consistently demonstrated strong ownership, professionalism, and a solution-oriented mindset. Whether it was delivering high-quality work, tackling complex challenges, or supporting the team, he always approached every task with dedication and reliability. Beyond his technical skills, he is an excellent team player always willing to collaborate, share knowledge, and help others succeed. His positive attitude and commitment to delivering value made him someone the team could always count on. I truly enjoyed working with him and would highly recommend him to any team looking for a dependable, skilled, and collaborative professional.
I have worked with Nikhil and he has been one of the few instrumental in making me progress further, he has great insights and in some ways changed the way I looked at some problems for the better. He is rigourous, has attention to detail and is a great communicator. I could only recommend him!
I had the pleasure of connecting with Nikhil Pagote, and I can confidently say he is one of the most technically capable and driven cloud and platform engineers I have come across. Nikhil brings deep expertise across DevOps, cloud-native infrastructure, and the emerging MLOps/LLMOps space — consistently delivering to a high standard. What sets him apart is his ability to bridge complex infrastructure challenges with practical, scalable solutions, whether that's architecting on AWS and Kubernetes, modernising CI/CD pipelines, or operationalising AI workloads in production. He is proactive, collaborative, and always willing to go the extra mile. I would highly recommend Nikhil to any team looking for a seasoned and forward-thinking cloud and platform engineering professional.
Open to new opportunities in Cloud Platform Engineering, DevOps/SRE, and Platform Engineering roles — with a strong interest in MLOps, LLMOps, Inference Engineering, AI infrastructure, and HPC for AI as my next frontier. Whether you have a role in mind or just want to talk infrastructure, I'd love to hear from you.