Mohamed Ansari H

Operations Manager

September 2021 - Present

Cloudera, Chennai.

Responsibilities:
• Driving the delivery of a world-class Product support team.
• Monitoring Service Level Agreements and Time to First Response goals and addressing issues as they arise.
• Handling global support queue health with appropriate prioritization of cases to the most suitable Engineer.
• Ensuring that customer's techncial cases are handled with the highest technical aptitude and customer service tone.
• Triaging, diagnosing, and escalating customer inquiries during their engineering and troubleshooting efforts.
• Conducting regular one-on-one with the team members.
• Setting OKRs and reviewing the same during the regular one-on-one meetings.
• Planning and ensuring enough staffing during the week and during weekends and holidays.
• Leading daily standup calls and ensuring all high priority cases are addressed first.
• Keeping the team up-to-date in the weekly workgroup meetings.
• Informing the team's progress and concerns in the management meetings.
• Conducting regular team-building activities online and offline.
• Processing extra shift allowances as required.
• Appreciating and awarding team members for their Dedication, commitment, Influence and Integrity.
• Coordinating, communicating and leading cross-functional efforts around escalations and engineering needs for the customer.
• Investigating product related issues/trends that arise.
• Studying and understanding critical system components and large cluster operations.
• Differentiating between issues that arise in operations, user code, third party libraries or products.
• Coordinating enhancement and feature requests with product management and Cloudera engineering.
• Managing day-to-day interactions with customers and the team.
• Identifying gaps for improvement and improving the process to address any issues.
• Recruiting, on-boarding and training new support engineers.
Leading and mentoring a team of technical professionals by setting and coaching towards goals that align with company strategy. Building career paths for direct reports enabling them to grow
• with Cloudera.
• Cultivating and maintaining team morale, DE&I(Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), accountability, integrity and collaboration.

Achievements:
• Started handling the team from the 2nd week.
• Awarded for learning quickly and managing the team in less than a month.
• Improved the team's performance significantly by identifying issues and adding new processes to resolve them.
• Identified gaps in the team's knowledge and organised training to fill in the gaps to improve the performance.
• Took responsibility for two large customers to be their Point of contact for support.
• Improved the team's performance significantly since taking over.

DevOps Team Leader

August 2020 - September 2021

Refinitiv, EPAM Systems, Hyderabad.

• Working with the Product Manager and planning for future products and enhancements.
• Leading daily standup calls and gathering information on the progress and blockers.
• Informing the team's progress and blockers in the management's status call.
• Providing reports to upper management on the progress and the issues, predicaments, blockers the team is facing.
• Ensuring reports and communication to upper management is in clear and concise English.
• Visualizing data about metrics into tables and graphics to present to upper management.
• Using the technical knowledge with management skills to complete tasks.
• Liaising and working with other teams to ensure faster delivery.
• Helping the team members with blockers.
• Setting quarterly learning goals for the team.
• Conducting regular one to one.
• Developing Terraform Infrastructure as Code to build and deploy SDP infra.
• Fine tuning Concourse CI to speed up deployments.

Key Projects:
• Moved from a Kanban model to an Agile Sprint model.
• Adding SonarQube to ensure the code being scanned is secure.
• Adding Twistlock to ensure the container image being used is secure.
• Adding Trufflehog to ensure no secrets are in the code repos being scanned.
• Fine tuning and increasing the security by adding layers to ensure only the right CI jobs can access the Hashicorp Key Vault and the secrets.
• Upgrading to the latest terraform version without breaking the existing infra.
• Automating deployment of the CI environment.
• Building a local container registry in ECR with approved secure docker images.
• Change management compliance through an automated Python Application that communicates with ServiceNow to create change request and triggers and email to the CAB from the pipeline.
• Replicating the current Secure Development platform on Gitlab as a POC to migrate from Concourse CI.
• Creating Golden AMIs and migrating existing EKS clusters to use the golden AMIs.
• Setting up monitoring and alerting for SDP using Grafana and via email.
• Created Runbooks and Operation Manuals for the Support team.

Achievements:
• Built and delivered the latest version of SDP.
• Successfully brought on board and trained 5 new team members to the team in a short span.
• Successfully trained the Support team on all components of SDP.

DevOps Team Leader (Big Data)

August 2020 - September 2021

Chevron, EPAM Systems, Hyderabad.

• Working with the Project Manager to understand the goals for the sprint.
• Defining the User Stories and the duration needed along with the acceptance criteria.
• Setting clear goals and to ensure the train is heading in the right direction.
• Distributing the tasks as even as possible.
• Leading daily standup calls and gathering information on the progress and blockers.
• Providing reports to upper management on the progress and the issues, predicaments, blockers the team is facing and in the management's daily status call
• Ensuring reports and communication to upper management is in clear and concise English.
• Visualizing data about metrics into tables and graphics to present to upper management.
• Working closely with Developers to understand the application’s infra requirements.
• Communicating across teams to complete tasks faster.
• Helping the team members with blockers.
• Setting quarterly learning goals for the team.
• Conducting regular one to one.

Achievements:
• Designing and developing the Common Ingestion platform for the Azure Big Data cluster.
• Automated monitoring and alerting by developing Ansible roles to create dashboards and to send alerts (Using KQL and Azure Log Analytics).
• Developing Ansible Roles to deploy Azure infrastructure.
• Using the Azure DevOps suite including Azure boards, Azure repos (git) and Azure pipelines and staying within budget.
• Switching to using Maven from using Nexus, storing and fetching the artifacts to and from JFrog.
• Developed and enhanced the DevOps framework, reducing toil and only a variables.yml file to make changes.
• Optimizing existing Ansible roles to reduce build time.
• Documented Operations Manuals, Ansible Role usage and Runbooks in Azure Repos.

Team Leader, SRE

July 2018 - July 2019

Symantec Dot Cloud Team, Symantec, Chennai.

• Driving Major incidents, performing postmortem of incidents along with relevant stake holders and reviewing incident reports.
• Handling review meetings with Client Support to ensure all Client escalations / issues are identified and to prepare action plan to drive the fix.
• Acting as a point of escalation for Global Operations during APJ hours.
• Identifying training needs and organizing internal and external trainings to keep the team up to date with the changes in the infrastructure.
• Scheduling and managing the Rota to ensure there is always enough coverage.
• Distributing priority tasks/events among team members evenly.
• Conducting regular one to one with the team and setting quarterly goals.
• Identifying team members on their grey areas and assigning mentors.
• Ensuring the team’s goals are in line with the organization’s vision.
• Leading the team during projects by assigning tasks that are of interest to the team member.
• Sharing weekly and monthly performance metrics with the team for visibility.
• Presenting team's metrics and progress to upper management.
• Managing infrastructure changes by being a member of CAB and Emergency change approvers.
• Driving automation initiatives.
• Promoting and establishing SRE culture within the team.
• Planning and taking care of team outing and recreational activities.

Key Projects:
• DC to AWS migration.
• Driving automation culture in the team that includes chat-ops integration via Slack.
• Monitoring noise reduction (Implemented Event Driven Automation and reduced manual troubleshooting by 90%.)
• Driving anomaly detection or golden signals that improved accuracy of the monitoring.

Achievements:
• Identified training needs in the team, evaluated training institutes and arranged Python training.
• Motivated the team and achieved AWS certification for the whole team with 100% compliance by arranging online materials from Linux academy and Pluralsight.
• Won the 2018 hackathon by scoring extra points for an outstanding presentation.

Security Infrastructure Administrator

July 2015 - July 2018

Security Infrastructure Administrator, Symantec, Chennai.

• L2 support for the Email & Web Security infrastructure that is spread across 13 datacenters globally. 
• Managing Linux servers based on Bind DNS/ Q-mail servers/ Squid proxy servers.
• Monitoring the infrastructure using Zenoss and a proprietary tool based on SNMP.
• Resolving L2 escalated from Client Support team.
• Responsible for handling the escalated issues within the team.
• Automating day to day Linux administration task using shell script, Ansible.
• Linux performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Identifying root cause of issues by analyzing system, service & application log files.
• Taking care of datacenter maintenance like power maintenance, Hardware upgradation and Migration.
• Using IDRAC and HP-ILO to identify hardware issues and coordinating with DC OPS team to fix it.
• AWS – EC2 and EBS volume troubleshooting, Adding DNS entries in route53, Adding/Modifying security groups for EC2 instance, Monitoring services via Cloud Watch.
• Managing Hadoop clusters in three regions, monitoring and troubleshooting alerts, going through logs to understand failed jobs to take necessary action and inform the stake holders.

Key Projects:
• Data Center (DC) consolidation.
• Data Center Refresh.
• Web Security Downsizing.

Achievements:
• Promoted to Supervisor.
• Developed shell scripts to fix known issues automatically, reducing monitoring noise.
• Developed a script to reduce time taken to write incident comms.

Team Leader

May 2014 – March 2015

CITI Bank, Wipro Technologies, Chennai.

• Shift scheduling and managing the team. 
• Sending periodic reports about the team’s performance to upper management.
• Submitting billing details to accounting based on the team's attendance.
• Technical and process documentation.
• Improving the process to increase delivery quality and reduce errors.
• Training new joiners.
• Ensuring Change management with adherence to ITIL.

Achievements:
• Successfully led and completed transition and knowledge transfer from the client.

Linux Administrator

January 2013 – May 2014

HCL Comnet, Chennai.

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) - Chennai.

• Building VMs and Physical machines.
• Maintaining LVMs.
• Performance monitoring.
• Building and maintaining machines and configurations through cfengine.
• Patching and upgrading Kernel.
• Granting sudo access to users.
• Troubleshooting disk/memory/CPU utilization issues.
• Creating rsync for directories to be shared across sites. 
• Scheduling cron jobs depending on business requirements.
• Centralized user management using Centrify Direct Control.
• Provisioning new machines using PXE and cfengine.
• Compiling procedural documentation.
• User Administration, VISUDO.
• Training new joiners.

Achievements:
• Successfully led and completed transition and knowledge transfer from the client.

Team Leader - IT Help Desk / Deskside and Server Support

August 2009 - January 2013

HCL Comnet, Chennai.

C’M’S’ Cameron McKenna – London & Chennai

• Scheduling Rota for the team.
• Training new joiners.
• Handling escalations.
• Having regular one to one with the team members.
• Scheduling and assigning team members for infrastructure changes for the weekend and out of business hours.
• Assigning team members to projects and sharing the tasks equally.
• Ensure the team handles computer hardware safe and complies with health and safety regulations.
• Ensuring delivery with adherence to SLA.
• Handling P1 and P2 incidents, sending comms and informing stake holders.
• Identifying room for improvement and improving processes.
• Generating reports about the team’s stack ranking and sharing with the team.
• Handling end users and partners escalations.
• Liaising with offshore teams to fix complex issues.
• Sharing the team’s metrics report and progress in clear and concise English with upper management.
• Asset management of users’ laptops, desktops, blackberries and all other IT devices.
• Compiling procedural documentation.
• Assisting offshore Network and Server teams with their projects.
• Identifying and taking responsibility of high priority tickets liaising with concerned teams and communicating with the stake holders.
• Handling customer escalations.
• Manage the entire work request process ensuring adherence to SLA.

Key Projects:
• Network Refresh.
• Print Refresh.
• Desktop Refresh.
• Frame room cleanup.
• Filesite migration.

Achievements:
• Sent onsite to London for performing consistently as a Service Desk Analyst.
• Awarded best Service Desk Analyst.
• Trained the team in Filesite with 100% compliance.

L2 Technical Support Executive

June 2008 – August 2009

DELL Canada, Sutherland, Chennai.

• Providing Level 2 Technical support for Dell customers.
• Handling escalated issues from the Level 1 support.
• Understanding the customer’s issues and troubleshooting and documentation. 
• Troubleshooting Dell Laptops and Desktops. 
• Training team members about the updates on process and technical information.

Achievements:
• Played a key role in the pilot team, Shared the knowledge and trained new joiners.
• Consistently met sales, FCR and ACL metrics.