Manjunath Shivarudrappa

Engineering Reliability Into Financial Platforms Through Automation, Observability, and SRE

Abstract:

In financial platforms, an API can be available, responsive, and still produce the wrong balance. That distinction makes reliability a problem of transaction correctness, timing, completeness, auditability, and recovery, not uptime alone. This invited talk examines how site reliability engineering can be adapted to interconnected finance estates spanning legacy systems, SaaS applications, cloud services, event streams, and deadline-driven batch workflows. It develops a six-dimensional reliability model and translates business obligations into service-level objectives for ledger accuracy, reconciliation, critical-path completion, and recoverability. The discussion explores business-semantic observability, distributed traces across asynchronous boundaries, data-quality signals, and synthetic transactions that validate outcomes rather than HTTP responses. Automation becomes an operational control through policy as code, evidence-generating pipelines, continuous drift detection, and risk-aware deployment gates. Particular attention is given to safe modernization using shadow runs, progressive delivery, idempotent processing, compensating transactions, and dependency-aware orchestration when conventional rollback is impossible. Resilience is assessed through tested recovery, bounded fault injection, and incident learning, with regulatory obligations treated as design constraints. The session closes by examining research opportunities in formal verification of financial invariants, causal incident analysis, and governed AI-assisted operations, advancing reliability from infrastructure health to measurable financial integrity.

Profile:

Manjunath Shivarudrappa is a senior engineering and technology leader with nearly 20 years of experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), infrastructure automation, and enterprise platform modernization. He currently serves as Senior Manager, Staff Software Engineering at GEICO, where he leads DevOps and SRE teams supporting mission-critical financial platforms, driving cloud transformation, application reliability, security, compliance, and large-scale engineering modernization. Throughout his career, Manjunath has held leadership and senior engineering roles at GEICO, Syapse, TaxAct, Citi, CVS Health, Cooper Tire & Rubber Company, Fujitsu, Country Fire Authority, and Yarra Valley Water. His experience includes enterprise cloud migrations, CI/CD transformation, Kubernetes-based platforms, infrastructure as code, cloud security, observability, and production operations across multiple industries. He has extensive experience with AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and other cloud-native technologies. His work focuses on improving reliability, scalability, security, automation, and operational excellence while leading high-performing engineering teams. Manjunath holds a Master of Engineering from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, India. He is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, a Microsoft Certified Professional, and certified in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.