In an era where cloud platforms are rapidly evolving and artificial intelligence is redefining software infrastructure, few technologists stand at the intersection with the clarity and foresight of Bandhavi Sakhamuri. A distinguished engineering leader, Bandhavi has spent nearly a decade shaping mission-critical systems in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, and most recently, MLOps. Her work not only reflects mastery over infrastructure and operations but also reveals a compelling vision for intelligent, self-adaptive cloud systems.
Currently a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at SolarWinds, Bandhavi is at the forefront of integrating observability, automation, and AI into scalable cloud-native environments. Her strategic contributions span enterprise-grade Kubernetes upgrades, cost optimization at scale, and the modernization of CI/CD pipelines—all while fostering a culture of resilience and innovation across teams.
Early Life and Academic Foundation: Engineering Rigor Meets Business Foresight
Bandhavi’s academic trajectory is marked by deliberate choices that reflect both technical rigor and strategic acumen. She earned her Bachelor’s in Electronics and Communication Engineering from JNTU Hyderabad, before relocating to the U.S. to pursue a Master’s in Information Technology and Management from Webster University. To bridge the gap between engineering execution and business leadership, she later completed an Executive MBA in IT and Leadership at Ottawa University.
A Career Built on Transformation and Impact
Bandhavi began her professional journey at AT&T, where she built foundational expertise in cloud networking and DevOps automation. At Pearson, she led the migration of monolithic applications to microservices on ECS/Fargate, while cutting CI/CD build times and driving zero-downtime deployments. Her time at Fannie Mae was equally impactful—her optimization of EMR batch jobs led to a 500% performance improvement and savings of $80K/month per product.
At Edward Jones, Bandhavi championed the adoption of observability best practices, deploying advanced monitoring solutions like Dynatrace and Grafana for on-premise platforms. Now at SolarWinds, she steers initiatives across EKS administration, CI/CD governance, and Azure Active Directory integration, contributing directly to platform reliability, security posture, and multi-cloud cost efficiency.
Notable Achievements: Where Precision Meets Impact
- Upgraded EKS clusters to version 1.31 at SolarWinds, improving scalability, high availability, and container orchestration reliability.
- Reduced EMR execution time from 6 hours to 1 at Fannie Mae, achieving $80K+ monthly savings per pipeline.
- Cut Jenkins build time by 50% at Pearson through pipeline and infrastructure tuning.
- Achieved zero-downtime ECS Fargate migrations, helping teams move away from legacy monoliths.
- Managed a $2.7M AWS budget, implementing right sizing strategies that slashed costs by 25%.
Each accomplishment not only reflects technical ingenuity but also a clear understanding of business impact and operational efficiency.
Thought Leadership and Contributions to the Tech Community
While Bandhavi has not yet published peer-reviewed papers, her thought leadership is reflected in her contributions across GitHub and Medium, where she explores emerging areas such as:
- QLoRA fine-tuning and parameter-efficient LLM training
- MLOps workflows for medical diagnostics and anomaly detection
- Data drift monitoring and post-deployment AI governance
Her projects in fraud detection, credit risk modeling, and medical image classification are not only technically sophisticated but also socially relevant—demonstrating how AI, when applied right, can drive real-world value.
Charting the Future: Where AI Meets Infrastructure
Bandhavi is now positioning herself at the frontier of AI-integrated cloud operations, combining her SRE experience with deep learning, vector databases, and intelligent agent frameworks.
Her current exploration includes:
- Advanced model deployment on AWS SageMaker and Bedrock
- LLM-powered orchestration using LangChain, Weaviate, and LangGraph
- Multi-agent systems for automated DevOps incident resolution
Her long-term vision? To build intelligent infrastructure that can monitor, optimize, and adapt autonomously—a future where SRE meets AI for real-time, self-healing cloud systems.
A Blueprint for the Future of Tech Leadership
In a world racing toward automation and intelligent systems, Bandhavi Sakhamuri is not just keeping pace—she’s setting the course. With her proven track record, strong academic grounding, and forward-thinking mindset, she offers a compelling example of what it means to be an engineering leader in the AI era.
As industries evolve toward AI-first infrastructure, Bandhavi’s work serves as a blueprint for building systems that are not only reliable and secure—but also intelligent, scalable, and future-proof.
