I am honored to write this recommendation for Prabhu Karunakaran, with whom I have had the pleasure of working for almost two years. Prabhu was hired as our DevOps manager and was tasked with the formidable challenge of cleaning up the backlog of Jira tickets and organizing our team. His extensive IT background and determination to prove his capabilities have consistently impressed me.
From the outset, Prabhu demonstrated remarkable leadership and organizational skills. Despite the initial daunting tasks, he quickly took control, efficiently managing the backlog and bringing structure to our team. I spent considerable time mentoring Prabhu, and his ability to rapidly acquire new skills and apply them effectively was truly impressive.
Prabhu has led numerous projects and consistently contributed more than his peers. One of the most significant projects under his leadership was overhauling our observability stack. Our previous stack was overly complex, fragmented across multiple interfaces, and challenging to manage. Prabhu and I collaborated on designing a streamlined, efficient solution that integrated all aspects of our infrastructure, applications, and third-party services.
The new observability plan was a massive success. We centralized all logs into CloudWatch using various parsers and techniques and employed Grafana for log searching and issue identification. This project exceeded our expectations and became a hit across all teams. Prabhu’s dedication, meticulous attention to detail, and commitment to delivering an outstanding end-user experience were evident in this project.
Prabhu possesses a vast skill set and a depth of experience that is difficult to match, even by those with extensive certifications. His understanding of cloud computing is comprehensive, and his proactive approach to learning is exemplary. When faced with a new challenge, Prabhu would often spend entire nights researching, building proofs of concept, and running tests, ensuring that by the next day, he was the expert in the room. This quality of relentless pursuit of knowledge and excellence is rare and invaluable.
In conclusion, Prabhu Karunakaran is a highly-skilled, dedicated, and innovative professional. His contributions have been instrumental to our success, and his ability to learn and adapt quickly makes him an exceptional asset to any team. I highly recommend Prabhu for any role he chooses to pursue, and I am confident that he will continue to excel and make significant contributions wherever he goes.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Smillie
VP of DevSecOps – Exact Payments LLC.
I had the pleasure of working with Prabhu for over an year at Steelwedge. As the head of Cloud Maintenance team in India he collaborated with executive team to scale and mature the global support team manifold by revamping operations, processes and culture to match with aggressive growth of the organization. Prabhu is very quick to identify and resolve high impact critical gaps and is in persistent pursuit of improvement opportunities. His exceptional people management skills and amicable approach with both external and internal teams at all levels have been a huge help to the organization in achieving several milestones in a short period of time. His knack in balancing competing business priorities without losing focus on customer satisfaction was great to witness. I would be great to work with him again.