3× GitHub Stars Award Winner

Building platforms
at Fortune 500 scale

I'm Nishkarsh Raj — Staff Platform Engineer with 6+ years architecting cloud infrastructure. Multi-cluster Kubernetes, high-throughput data pipelines, and AI-powered FinOps that has delivered $7M in savings.

 
Nishkarsh Raj
NR
☸️ 100+ node EKS
⚡ 536 Kafka connectors
💰 $7M saved
$0M
Savings delivered
0+
Years of experience
0
Kafka connectors in prod
0+
Engineers on my platforms
GitHub Stars Award
whoami

Platform engineering, end to end

I design and run the infrastructure that engineering organizations build on. At Caesars Entertainment, that means a multi-cluster EKS platform spanning 100+ Graviton nodes and 15 AWS accounts, engineered for regulatory compliance across 35 US states — with namespace isolation per state and custom node provisioning that reconciles FluxCD and Karpenter.

I care about platforms that pay for themselves: an ARM64 migration that cut compute costs by 40%, an AI-powered FinOps engine on AWS Bedrock that surfaced $2M in annual savings, and Kafka connector topology tuning that halved Snowflake API calls at 99.9% uptime.

Before that, I built an enterprise Backstage.io developer platform for 2,000+ engineers, unified observability across Broadcom's acquisitions (1M+ deployment events a day), and led zero-downtime GitHub Enterprise migrations. Open source runs deep — Microsoft has recognized me as a GitHub Star three years running.

Quick facts

role Staff Platform Engineer
company Caesars Entertainment
location Jersey City, NJ
degree B.Tech CS — 9.6 CGPA, Gold Medalist 🥇
focus Kubernetes · GitOps · FinOps · Data Platforms
oss GitHub Star '21 '22 '23
git log --career

Experience

Six years of shipping platforms that engineers love and CFOs approve of.

Staff Platform Engineer
07/2024 — Present · Jersey City, NJ
Caesars Entertainment (via StatusNeo)
  • Architected multi-cluster EKS platform — 3 clusters, 100+ Graviton nodes, 15 AWS accounts — for 35-state regulatory compliance with per-state namespace isolation; led ARM64 migration for a 40% cost reduction.
  • Designed high-throughput Kafka pipeline (536 Strimzi connectors) streaming to Snowflake/S3 — cut Snowflake API calls by 50% at 99.9% uptime.
  • Built AI-powered FinOps platform (AWS Bedrock + FastAPI) across 15 accounts — automated scanning surfaced $2M annual savings.
  • Architected zero-downtime Airflow v2→v3 migration — parallel instances, fresh CloudNativePG databases, per-state feature flags, automated validation for 3,400+ DAGs.
  • Built observability stack with Dynatrace (Terraform + dtctl) and custom OpenTelemetry metrics — reduced MTTR with automated RCA for Karpenter, Snowflake, and Redis incidents.
Senior Platform Engineer
01/2022 — 07/2024 · Gurugram, India
StatusNeo
  • Architected enterprise Backstage.io platform for 2,000+ engineers — plugin architecture with sub-second scaffolding and 300+ templates; onboarding dropped from 4 weeks to 3 days.
  • Built unified observability across Broadcom acquisitions (CA, Symantec, VMware) — 1M+ deployment events daily, custom Prometheus exporters, DORA metrics for 10,000+ engineers.
  • Led IDP for William Hill (150+ engineers) with GitOps workflows — provisioning from 2 weeks to 15 minutes; market launches from 6 months to 2 weeks.
  • Led GitHub Enterprise migrations for 2,000+ developers (SVN/Bitbucket → GitHub) — zero downtime, 2 months early, $400K storage savings.
Platform Engineer
05/2020 — 01/2022 · Gurugram, India
StatusNeo
  • Architected AI model orchestration on Kubernetes (Seldon Core, gRPC) — sub-200ms P95 latency with 50+ ML models in production; established the org's AI platform practices.
the stack

Skills & tooling

The tools I reach for when infrastructure needs to scale, stream, and stay observable.

☁️ Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS EKSRDSEC2S3KMSBedrockMSKKubernetesTerraformTerragruntHelmHelmfileFluxCDKarpenterDocker

🌊 Data Platform

Strimzi Kafka ConnectSnowflakeSnowpipeApache AirflowCloudNativePGRedisPostgreSQL

🔭 Observability

OpenTelemetryDynatraceNew RelicPrometheusDistributed tracingCustom metrics SDK

🛠️ Platform Engineering

Backstage.ioGitOpsMulti-cluster EKSIstioGitLab CIGitHub Actions

⌨️ Languages

PythonGoBashJava
trophy cabinet

Awards & certifications

Recognition from the community and the platforms I build on.

GitHub Stars Award ×3

Recognized by Microsoft in 2021, 2022 & 2023 for open-source impact

🛡️

GitHub Advanced Security

Certified · Feb 2023

⚙️

GitHub Admin

Certified · Jan 2023

🚀

GitHub Actions

Certified · Dec 2022

🥇

Gold Medalist

B.Tech Computer Science, UPES · 9.6 CGPA · Dean's List, all semesters

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Let's build something massive

Whether it's platform engineering at scale, open source, or a speaking opportunity — my inbox is open.