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About Keshav Bhardwaj

From the Escalation Queue to Platform Engineering

I am Keshav Bhardwaj, an enterprise support engineer with over 5 years of experience keeping mission-critical digital experiences and telecom backends running quietly in production.

For the past 3.5+ years at Acquia (Dec 2022 – Present), I have served as a Drupal Digital Experience (DXP) Support Engineer. I own high-severity production escalations for global enterprise brands running on Acquia Cloud and Site Factory. My day-to-day work lives deep in PHP stack traces, database deadlocks, varnish caching topologies, and containerized platform infrastructure.

The Crucible: Competitive National Exams & SSB Leadership (2016 – 2021)

After graduating with a Bachelor of Technology in 2016, I dedicated several years to one of the most intellectually and psychologically demanding paths in India: competitive examinations for national service and armed forces leadership.

During this intensive period, I cleared the UPSC Combined Defence Services (CDS) examination thrice, the Air Force Common Admission Test (AFCAT) five times, and the Indian Railways examination once.

These achievements earned me invitations to multiple 5-day Services Selection Board (SSB) evaluations — universally recognized as one of the world's most rigorous leadership assessment systems. Across psychological projective testing, situational reaction tests (SRT), group obstacles, and high-pressure command tasks, SSB evaluates Officer-Like Qualities (OLQs): decision-making under crisis, resourcefulness, group cohesion, and unwavering composure when plans fail.

This crucible forged the mindset I bring to engineering leadership today: panic is a choice, clarity under pressure is a duty, and true leaders make their teams confident rather than anxious.

Entering IT Operations: Bharti Airtel (June 2021 – Dec 2022)

In June 2021, I channeled this disciplined problem-solving into enterprise technology, joining Diksha Technologies catering to Bharti Airtel as an Application & Database Support / Operations Engineer. Operating in a 24x7 telecom environment taught me the gravity of strict SLAs, how to troubleshoot Linux server performance under high transaction volumes, and how to maintain calm, authoritative communication across multi-tiered bridge calls during critical network outages.

Enterprise Drupal DXP at Acquia (Dec 2022 – Present)

For the past 3.5+ years at Acquia, I have served as a Drupal Digital Experience (DXP) Support Engineer. I own Sev-1 and high-severity production escalations for global enterprise brands running on Acquia Cloud and Site Factory. My work lives deep in PHP stack traces, database deadlocks, varnish caching topologies, and containerized platform infrastructure.

The DevOps & SRE Evolution

Supporting large-scale systems eventually leads to a fundamental realization: the fastest way to resolve an outage is to prevent it by architecture.

Over the past two years, I have actively expanded my engineering scope into modern Cloud and Platform engineering:

  • Containers & Orchestration: Packaging applications into minimal, secure Docker images and managing declarative deployments, Services, and Ingress routing in Kubernetes.
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Designing resilient compute, networking (VPCs, Subnets), and security policies across Amazon Web Services (AWS).
  • CI/CD Pipelines: Writing automated GitHub Actions workflows for continuous integration, linting, testing, and deployment.
  • Automation & Workflow Orchestration: Building automated diagnostic scripts in Python and event-driven alerting bridges with self-hosted n8n.

Leadership Philosophy

"Every outage is a conversation between a distributed system and the people who rely on it."

When systems fail, blame solves nothing. The best engineers build runbooks, automate repetitive toil, and turn customer pain into measurable Service Level Objectives (SLOs). My goal as a technical leader is to build platforms and teams that fail gracefully, recover fast, and become a little more boring every quarter.

I am always open to discussing DevOps opportunities, Kubernetes platform design, and site reliability engineering. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or check out my work on GitHub.