CurrentlyConcurrent roles across AI & social media at scale

Sai Gopal

Staff SRE  ·  Bay Area

Building reliable, scalable infrastructure. Obsessed with automation, observability, and keeping systems humming at scale.

Who I am

I'm a Staff Site Reliability Engineer with deep roots in distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and large-scale service operations. My work sits at the intersection of software engineering and platform reliability — building the systems that keep everything else running.

I've spent over a decade designing and operating multi-region platforms, driving down toil through automation, and embedding reliability thinking into engineering culture. From on-call runbooks to capacity planning, I care about the full reliability lifecycle.

Outside of production systems, I contribute to open-source tooling, run a homelab, and write about operational lessons learned along the way.

  • Eliminate toil through automation
  • 🔭 Observability as a first-class requirement
  • 🛡️ Reliability engineered in, not bolted on
  • 📖 Blameless post-mortems & continuous learning
12+ yrsIn infrastructure
Staff SRECurrent level
3 orgsAcross industry
SREOps → Staff trajectory

Where I've worked

AI Research Lab2024 – Present
Member of Technical Staff

Reliability and infrastructure for large-scale AI training and inference systems. GPU cluster provisioning and lifecycle management, platform security hardening, and OS fleet upgrades across heterogeneous hardware.

Large Social Platform2018 – Present · ~8 yrs
Staff Site Reliability Engineer → Staff

Progressed from SRE to Staff SRE, working across the core infrastructure stack. Owned reliability for critical platform services at global scale. Led datacenter build-outs, mass provisioning of bare-metal fleets, and DC shuffle operations. Owned OS and kernel upgrade programs including the Hadoop data platform. SRE coverage for the database tier — MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Vertica. Configuration management with Puppet, Python automation for on-call toil reduction, security hardening, and SLO frameworks.

Internet Services Company2014 – 2018 · ~4 yrs
System Architect → Architect

Grew from Operations Engineer to System Architect. Large-scale hosting and web infrastructure — systems automation, capacity planning, datacenter operations, and infrastructure-as-code.

Full work history on LinkedIn

Writing

Let's connect

Whether you want to talk reliability engineering, share ideas, or just say hello — my inbox is open.

[email protected]