Hi, I'm Sumit, Senior SRE & Lead Architect

OpenShift & Kubernetes | Elasticsearch & Kafka | Agentic AI for Operations

Contact me

About Me

I'm a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and Lead Architect at Cisco with 16+ years in large-scale infrastructure. I architect high-availability platforms on OpenShift and Kubernetes, run Elasticsearch and Kafka as enterprise SaaS, and lead teams of 8+ engineers through modernization and security governance.

These days I'm putting generative and agentic AI to work in operations: RAG, MCP and LangGraph systems that handle root-cause analysis, anomaly detection and day-to-day support so engineers can focus on the hard problems. In 2025 Cisco nominated me to speak at PegaWorld about our global Pega migration to OpenShift.

Certifications

  • Cisco Generative AI Green Belt
  • DevOps Engineer, Edureka
  • Ansible and Python/Django, Udemy and Capgemini

Education

  • MCA, Bangalore University
  • BCA, MCRP University

Experience

Sixteen years with one constant: Cisco's platforms. First as a lead developer and architect through Capgemini, then in-house as an SRE and architect, moving workloads from VMs to containers and now to AI-assisted operations.

  1. Cisco Systems

    Senior SRE and Senior Architect: AI-driven operations and SaaS architecture

    Sep 2024 to present

    USA

    • Architected and deployed agentic AI (RAG, MCP, LangGraph) that automates root-cause analysis and anomaly detection.
    • Moved multiple Elasticsearch clusters from Cloud DB to a managed SaaS model with multi-DC awareness, shard management and S3 snapshot and restore.
    • Tuned Pega performance on OpenShift; built API-driven automation for server lifecycle and security governance.
    • Invited speaker at PegaWorld 2025 on the global Pega platform migration roadmap.

  2. Cisco Systems

    Senior SRE and Senior Architect: cloud migration strategy

    Sep 2023 to Aug 2024

    Canada

    • Led the migration of 30+ business-critical applications from legacy VMs to Cisco CAE on OpenShift.
    • Ran proofs of concept for containerizing Pega: clustering services, Kafka integration and external dependency mapping.

  3. Cisco Systems

    Senior SRE: platform modernization and CI/CD

    Feb 2022 to Aug 2023

    USA

    • Designed CI/CD pipelines for React and Node.js apps with Spinnaker, Jenkins, JFrog and U-Deploy.
    • Provisioned and managed enterprise infrastructure on OpenStack and Horizon.

  4. Capgemini (client: Cisco Systems)

    Senior Engineer and Lead Developer

    Apr 2010 to Jan 2022

    Bangalore, India and San Jose, USA

    • Architectural oversight and development leadership across India and US offices for Cisco's business process automation tools.
    • Led development of Cisco Prime Optical and EMAN host and networking applications for carrier-class network management.
    • Built self-service tools and REST APIs for remote management of Pega JVMs, cutting operational toil.
    • Guided cross-functional teams from requirements and UI design through production deployment and UAT.

Projects

Selected work across AI-driven operations, platform engineering, migrations and security. Filter by area.

AI for Ops2024 to now

Agentic root-cause analysis

Cisco Systems

Agentic AI that automates root-cause analysis and anomaly detection across the platform.

  • RAG
  • MCP
  • LangGraph
  • LLMs

AI for Ops2024 to now

Smart support assistant

Cisco Systems

An agentic chat assistant that answers day-to-day questions and service requests for platform support and Pega app teams, reducing incidents and effort.

  • RAG
  • MCP tools
  • DB integration

Security60% less manual work

AI-based container patching

Cisco Systems

Automatically identifies and patches vulnerabilities in container images, cutting manual security overhead by 60%.

  • Docker
  • AI
  • Vulnerability remediation

Speaking2025

PegaWorld 2025 talk

Nominated by Cisco

Presented the global migration of the Pega platform to a containerized OpenShift environment, and the roadmap behind it.

  • Pega
  • OpenShift
  • Migration strategy

Platform2024 to now

Elasticsearch as managed SaaS

Cisco Systems

Moved clusters from Cloud DB to a managed SaaS model with multi-DC awareness, primary and replica shard management, and S3 snapshot and restore.

  • Elasticsearch
  • AWS S3
  • Multi-DC

Migration2023 to 2024

30+ apps to OpenShift

Cisco Systems

Led the move of 30+ business-critical applications from legacy VMs to Cisco CAE on OpenShift, backed by Pega containerization proofs of concept.

  • OpenShift
  • Kafka
  • Pega

Platform2022 to 2023

CI/CD for modern apps

Cisco Systems

Delivery pipelines for React and Node.js applications, plus OpenStack infrastructure provisioning.

  • Spinnaker
  • Jenkins
  • JFrog
  • OpenStack

PlatformCapgemini

Pega JVM self-service

Capgemini for Cisco

Self-service tools and REST APIs for remote management of Pega JVMs, removing a steady source of operational toil.

  • REST APIs
  • Pega
  • Automation

Skills

My toolkit spans container orchestration, data and streaming platforms, infrastructure as code, observability and, increasingly, AI engineering.

I care most about systems that stay up, scale cleanly and are boring to operate, and about automating the toil out of keeping them that way.

  • OpenShift
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • OpenStack
  • AWS
  • Elasticsearch
  • Kafka
  • Splunk
  • Grafana
  • Kibana
  • AppDynamics
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • Helm
  • Vault
  • Consul
  • Nomad
  • Argo CD
  • Spinnaker
  • Jenkins
  • Git
  • Linux
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Django
  • Flask
  • Node.js
  • React
  • LLMs
  • RAG
  • LangGraph
  • MCP
  • Weaviate
  • Pega
  • TLS
  • DNS
  • Conjur

Contact Me

Open to conversations about platform architecture, SRE leadership and putting AI to work in operations. Write to me below; your email app opens with the message filled in.

Sumit Kumar
Research Triangle Park,
North Carolina, USA
Email