Junaid Shaikh

Managed and maintained 8 Azure lower environments, ensuring smooth upgrades, desired state configuration, and resolving ~90% of tester/developer issues within SLA. Reduced average incident resolution time by 40% through proactive monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana, combined with automation of repetitive fixes. Collaborated with clients to gather VM specifications (CPU, memory, storage, OS type) and required pre-installed software/tools. Streamlined VM provisioning using Terraform templates, enabling consistent and repeatable creation of VMs of varying sizes. Integrated Ansible playbooks to configure newly provisioned VMs by installing required software stacks, applying OS-level hardening per security policies, and managing users, groups, and permissions. Drove Azure cost optimization by introducing nightly shutdown/start schedules for lower environments, achieving ~35-40% cloud cost reduction. Automated deployment and operational workflows, reducing manual effort by ~50% and cutting deployment time from hours to minutes. Enabled parameterized deployments so clients could request any number of VMs with custom configurations via a single template change. Built a Pulumi POC to assess modern IaC using Python, focusing on modular infrastructure design, code reuse, and seamless CI/CD integration. Established a Git branching strategy restricting direct commits to the master branch, improving code quality and reducing deployment errors by ~25%.

Implemented DevSecOps practices across multiple projects, enabling secure, simplified CI/CD delivery pipelines. Resolved critical multi-cloud networking issues (AWS, GCP, Azure), including VPC/VNet peering challenges, ensuring uninterrupted development. Enhanced CI/CD pipelines for Java applications by integrating SonarQube, OWASP Dependency Check, and Trivy to enforce code quality, vulnerability scanning, and dependency security. Administered Kubernetes clusters with high availability and auto-scaling, improving performance during peak workloads. Led MongoDB migration from Azure-hosted servers to MongoDB Atlas across environments, improving scalability, uptime, and performance by ~25%. Performed resource utilization analysis, optimizing container limits and reducing infrastructure costs by ~15%. Built and maintained Jenkins-based CI/CD pipelines, automating end-to-end workflows and minimizing deployment failures. Provisioned and managed cloud infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible for consistent, repeatable environments. Set up application monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana to improve observability and incident response.