Farhan Qureshi
Principal SRE / Head of Platform Engineering
Dubai, UAE • +971 50 418 7726 • farhan.qureshi@proton.me • linkedin.com/in/farhan-qureshi-sre • github.com/farhanq
Portfolio: www.eliorexa.com/portfolio/cloud-devops-engineer-senior
Professional Summary
Platform and SRE leader with 12 years building reliable, cost-efficient cloud infrastructure at scale. Sets cloud strategy across AWS, Azure and GCP, designs multi-region Kubernetes platforms, and leads teams of 12–20 engineers. Ties reliability engineering to business outcomes — uptime, cloud P&L and developer velocity — having owned an 8-figure cloud budget, driven SLO programs to 99.99% availability, and grown engineers into senior and staff SRE roles.
Skills
Leadership: Platform & SRE strategy, Team building (12–20), Cloud FinOps / budget ownership, Hiring & mentoring, Incident command
Architecture: Multi-region & DR, Kubernetes at scale, Zero-trust networking, Event-driven systems, Service mesh (Istio)
Platform: AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD, Crossplane
Reliability & security: SLOs / error budgets, Prometheus, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Vault, CI/CD governance
Core Competencies
platform engineering · SRE · AWS · Azure · GCP · Kubernetes · Terraform · multi-region · CI/CD · observability · FinOps · SLO · reliability · scale
Work Experience
Head of Platform Engineering & SRE — Meridian Logistics Cloud
May 2019 – Present
Dubai
- Lead a 20-engineer platform org running a multi-region Kubernetes platform across AWS and Azure that serves 2.5M daily users and peaks at 14,000 requests/second.
- Own a $9.4M annual cloud budget; drove a FinOps program of rightsizing, savings plans and Karpenter autoscaling that cut spend 29% (~$2.7M/year) while traffic grew 60%.
- Architected active-active multi-region failover with Terraform and Argo CD, reducing RTO from 45 minutes to under 4 and surviving 2 regional outages with zero customer-visible downtime.
- Established a company-wide SLO + error-budget program that lifted platform availability from 99.9% to 99.99% and cut Sev-1 incidents 58% year over year.
- Hired 13 engineers and grew 5 into senior/staff SRE roles; defined the golden-path internal developer platform that cut service onboarding from days to under 1 hour.
Lead DevOps / SRE Manager — Aquila Media Group
Mar 2015 – Apr 2019
Bengaluru
- Led a team of 9 migrating a data-center monolith to AWS and Kubernetes, cutting infrastructure cost ~₹3.1 crore/year and enabling weekly releases.
- Introduced Terraform, GitOps and centralized observability across 12 teams, reducing release incidents 64% and standardizing CI/CD on GitHub Actions and Jenkins.
DevOps / Systems Engineer — Earlier roles — Wipro, Razorpay
2013 – 2015
India
- Automated Linux fleet provisioning and CI/CD for banking and payments platforms with Ansible and Jenkins; promoted twice for reliability and delivery.
Education
B.E. Information Technology
2013
University of Mumbai, Mumbai
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Amazon Web Services (2022)
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) — CNCF (2021)
- Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect — Google Cloud (2021)
Selected Achievements
- Cut cloud spend ~$2.7M/year (−29%) via a FinOps program while platform traffic grew 60%.
- Raised platform availability from 99.9% to 99.99% through an SLO + error-budget program, surviving 2 regional outages with zero downtime.
- Speaker, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon — "Active-active across two clouds without breaking the bank."
- CNCF community mentor and advisor to 2 early-stage startups on cloud architecture and reliability.