Ashwin (cruisemaniac)

An Infra-everything engineer keeping teams shipping

Equal opportunity server whipper, software engineering therapist, and systems leader making infra, DX, and reliability feel easy.

20+ years shipping systems 4.5M students at scale Leadership across infra, cloud, and DX

How I can help

I work with teams that want reliability and developer velocity without platform chaos.

Infra strategy and execution

Turn roadmap pressure into a practical infra plan with clear priorities, architecture decisions, and delivery cadence.

Reliability and platform coaching

Raise uptime and reduce firefighting through observability, incident habits, and engineering leadership support.

Email mail@ashwinm.net to start a conversation.

Now

Senior Cloud Architect at SteerAi, Abu Dhabi, building HPC and cloud platforms for the Autonomous Robotics Research Center at TII. AWS Community Builder (Containers) and leader of the Abu Dhabi AWS User Group.

Current Location: UAE · Operating since 2005.

What I focus on

  • Infra strategy
  • Reliability & observability
  • Developer experience
  • Cloud pragmatism (not multi-cloud for the sake of it)
  • Mentoring & calm engineering cultures

Recent highlights

2023 →

Senior Cloud Architect · SteerAi / TII

Building and running HPC and cloud infrastructure for the Autonomous Robotics Research Center — a team of 200+ researchers. Inherited manually-provisioned GPU nodes and brought automated training pipelines to a hybrid setup of ~25 on-prem nodes and equivalent AWS capacity. Introduced Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, AlertManager, and Karpenter on EKS to bring the platform up to production-grade observability and reliability.

2021 - 2023

Director of Engineering · CoLearn

Grew the engineering team from 3 to 40 people while scaling systems to serve 4.5M students with sub-second video streaming. Eliminated daily outages and weekly deployment cycles — replacing them with 100% uptime and up to 100 deployments per day. Overhauled CI/CD, migrated infra from Terraform to CDK, re-architected for scale, and built an on-call culture that made reliability a team habit.

2018 - 2019

Zoomcar

Migrated Zoomcar's entire fleet platform from on-prem data centers to AWS — connecting 10,000 cars to the cloud. Later spoke about this at AWS Community Day Kochi to one of the largest audiences of my career.

2016 - 2018

Fybr

Built backend systems for city-scale IoT — smart parking infrastructure, smart agriculture platforms, and connected sensor networks operating at urban scale.

2014 - 2016

Freshdesk

Early infra and cloud work at one of India's breakout SaaS companies.

Signals

"Understanding computer networks, CPU architectures, operating systems, and databases at a non-trivial skill level is a superpower."

— on the pillars that make every system work

"Multi-cloud is still a word, but you probably do not need multi-cloud Kubernetes."

— advocating pragmatic cloud choices

"It's a CRUD app; write better queries and fix it."

— a reminder to keep things simple and solid

Contact

Best way to reach me is email: mail@ashwinm.net.

Typically responds within 48 hours.

Links