# Gaurav Ashtikar

Co-Founder & Director, Platforms | AI Operations, Platform Engineering & DevOps

Pune, Maharashtra, India  
Email: gau1991@gmail.com  
Website: https://gau1991.me  
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gau1991/  
GitHub: https://github.com/gau1991

## Professional Summary

Gaurav Ashtikar is a Co-Founder and platform engineering leader with 13+ years of experience building cloud platforms, DevOps systems, automation products, and AI-driven operations tooling.

He is the builder of OpsRabbit, a self-hosted AI incident-investigation platform for ITOps, DevOps, SRE, infrastructure, security, and enterprise IT teams.

As Co-Founder & Director, Platforms at Applied AI Consulting, he built OpsRabbit from the ground up into a self-hosted enterprise product that connects alerts, operational context, collaboration channels, automation, and AI-led investigation. He also led customer-facing DevOps and SRE consulting across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes deployments, infrastructure automation, platform operations, reliability improvement, and cloud cost control.

## Core Strengths

- AI operations products: incident investigation, alert workflows, runbooks, knowledge systems, and human-in-the-loop automation
- Platform engineering: cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, release automation, self-service tooling, and reliable operating models
- Infrastructure automation: provisioning, configuration management, container platforms, Linux operations, and repeatable environment setup
- Enterprise readiness: secure self-hosted deployments, access control, approval flows, auditability, redaction, and operational guardrails
- Product ownership: founder-level ownership from idea and architecture through implementation, delivery, documentation, and customer-facing workflows
- Consulting and enablement: DevOps transformation, AWS modernization, team leadership, workshops, and technical training

## Professional Experience

### Applied AI Consulting - Co-Founder & Director, Platforms

Aug 2019 - Present, Pune, India

Product: OpsRabbit

- Built OpsRabbit from the ground up, taking it from an initial Slack-based investigation concept to a self-hosted enterprise platform for AI-assisted operations.
- Led product architecture and implementation across the user experience, core platform, persistent investigation history, alert ingestion, collaboration channels, and administrative controls.
- Built alert investigation workflows for Datadog, PagerDuty, Jira, and Email: normalize incoming alerts, preserve event history, create or reuse investigation threads, run AI analysis, and send provider-specific follow-ups.
- Designed investigation capabilities for safe automation, operational memory, runbook-style guidance, infrastructure context, knowledge search, and customer-system integrations.
- Built access through web, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, with support for threaded conversations, file attachments, rich replies, deep links, and diagram rendering.
- Implemented enterprise controls for user access, secret storage, approval flows, command guardrails, scoped integrations, redaction, structured logging, and optional isolated execution.

Consultancy: DevOps and SRE

- Led DevOps and SRE consulting work for customers across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes deployments, infrastructure automation, platform operations, reliability improvement, and cloud cost control.
- Managed and mentored a team of 30+ DevOps and SRE engineers delivering customer infrastructure, automation, deployment, monitoring, and operations programs.
- Helped businesses modernize and transform operations through AI technology, DevOps practices, AWS cloud services, and automation-first delivery.

### Flux7 - DevOps Engineer

2019

- Worked on DevOps and cloud engineering initiatives across automation, cloud infrastructure, and delivery engineering.

### REAN Cloud - Cloud Architect

Jan 2018 - Jan 2019, Pune, India

- Led team-level work and internal product initiatives for cloud automation and infrastructure delivery.
- Participated in code reviews, architecture reviews, and technical design discussions.
- Designed AWS infrastructure for cloud-native workloads and developed serverless applications using AWS Lambda.

### REAN Cloud - Senior Cloud Automation Engineer

Sep 2016 - Dec 2017, Pune, India

- Designed and implemented AWS infrastructure for customer and internal environments.
- Automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration using Terraform, Ansible, and Chef.
- Built CI/CD pipelines, Docker-based infrastructure, Debian/RPM packages using Chef Omnibus, and delivered Chef/Ansible workshops.

### Opex Software Corp. - Cloud Automation Engineer & Python Developer

Apr 2016 - Aug 2016, Pune, India

- Automated operational tasks using Chef and Ansible.
- Built infrastructure automation using Terraform and Packer.
- Set up Jenkins CI environments and provisioned AWS infrastructure.

### rtCamp - Linux System Administrator

May 2014 - Mar 2016, Pune, India

- Administered Ubuntu and Debian Linux servers across installation, troubleshooting, monitoring, backup, and recovery.
- Managed Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Git, Jenkins, Travis CI, WordPress, Discourse, and GitLab environments.
- Developed and maintained EasyEngine automation for WordPress setup on Debian/Ubuntu servers using Python and Shell scripting.
- Built Nginx and PHP packages for Debian and Ubuntu.

### Tata Consultancy Services - Assistant System Engineer / System Administrator

Jul 2013 - May 2014, Pune, India

- Performed real-time server administration, monitoring, backup, and recovery.
- Automated day-to-day operational tasks using Shell scripting and deployed PHP-based applications.

## Selected Projects

- OpsRabbit: AI-powered incident investigation platform for ITOps, DevOps, SRE, infrastructure, cloud, security, and enterprise IT teams.
- EasyEngine: command-line automation for Nginx-based WordPress infrastructure on Debian and Ubuntu.
- DoudouLinux: Linux distribution designed to make computer use easy and pleasant for children aged 2 to 12.
- Pragat Cluster Automation Toolkit: Python/PHP automation tooling for mass deployment of CentOS-based OpenMPI clusters.

## Education

Bachelor of Technology - Information Technology, Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli, 2009 - 2013

## Certifications and Awards

- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, previously certified
- Employee of the Year 2017, REAN Cloud
- Employee of the Month, REAN Cloud and TCS
- ILP Kudos, TCS Training
- Student of the Year, Department of Information Technology