Saikumar Adumulla

Mar 2024 — Present

• Optimized backbone routing by reconfiguring BGP and OSPF protocols on Cisco ASR 9k and Juniper MX routers, reducing average network latency by 15% and supporting 10Gbps traffic growth across the core network.
• Hardened network security posture by implementing 150+ granular firewall policies on Palo Alto Networks (including Panorama for centralized management), blocking an average of 2,000 intrusion attempts per month and ensuring compliance with internal security standards.
• Accelerated SD-WAN deployment by configuring 50+ Viptela branch sites, cutting branch connectivity setup time from 2 weeks to 3 days while ensuring zero downtime during cutovers.
• Reduced critical incident response time by 20% by utilizing SolarWinds Orion and Wireshark to proactively identify and resolve packet loss and latency issues before they impacted users.
• Maintained 99.99% wireless uptime for 5,000+ concurrent users by managing and troubleshooting Aruba wireless controllers, access points, and conducting periodic RF site surveys.
• Authored 30+ network topology diagrams in Visio for the operations and engineering teams, reducing new engineer onboarding time by 2 weeks and improving cross-team collaboration.
• Enabled hybrid cloud expansion by configuring and maintaining AWS Direct Connect links and VPN tunnels, ensuring secure, low-latency, and stable connectivity for cloud-hosted applications.
• Owned Tier-3 on-call incident resolution for critical network outages, leading 10+ post-incident root cause analyses and implementing permanent fixes that prevented recurrence.
• Collaborated with the network security team to deploy MACsec encryption on data center links, protecting data-in-transit for sensitive customer information.
• Upgraded IOS-XE software on 30+ Catalyst 9k switches during maintenance windows, patching critical vulnerabilities and introducing new hardware features with zero production impact.
• Reduced configuration errors by automating routine ACL and VLAN deployments using Python scripts (Netmiko), saving the engineering team approximately 8 hours per week.
• Environment: Cisco ASR 9k, Juniper MX, Palo Alto Firewalls, Panorama, Viptela SD-WAN, Aruba Wireless, BGP, OSPF, AWS Direct Connect, VPN, MACsec, SolarWinds Orion, Wireshark, Python (Netmiko).

Jun 2021 — Jul 2023

• Guaranteed 99.99% uptime for the corporate LAN/WAN by performing daily health checks and proactive troubleshooting on Cisco Catalyst (3850, 9300) and Nexus (7k, 5k) switches across 10+ regional data centers.
• Supported onboarding of 300+ new users annually by executing VLAN, VTP, and STP configurations on access and distribution switches, ensuring seamless network integration within 24 hours of HR requests.
• Executed WAN migration of 20+ branch offices from legacy MPLS to Meraki SD-WAN (MX appliances), resulting in a 30% reduction in annual WAN operational costs and a 25% improvement in application response times.
• Improved application availability by assisting in the configuration and maintenance of F5 BIG-IP LTM load balancers for internal banking applications, handling 50,000+ daily transactions with zero critical failures.
• Strengthened endpoint security posture by assisting in the rollout of 802.1x network access control using Cisco ISE across 1,000+ corporate devices, resolving 95% of authentication issues within the first hour of ticket creation.
• Streamlined change management compliance by documenting 200+ incidents, changes, and problems in ServiceNow, achieving a 100% audit pass rate for all network change requests over two years.
• Automated routine DNS and DHCP updates by writing Python scripts (using Infoblox API), saving the engineering team 5 hours per week on manual data entry and reducing human errors by 90%.
• Reduced voice and video jitter by implementing QoS policies (CBWFQ, LLQ) on WAN routers, prioritizing latency-sensitive traffic and improving user satisfaction scores for VoIP by 15%.
• Collaborated with the application development team to troubleshoot connectivity issues in the pre-production environment, analyzing packet captures to identify misconfigured firewall rules.
• Owned the network documentation repository in Confluence, creating standardized runbooks for common troubleshooting scenarios used by the 24/7 NOC team.
• Supported disaster recovery drills by validating network failover procedures for critical banking applications, ensuring RTO and RPO objectives were consistently met.
• Assisted in capacity planning by analyzing NetFlow data to predict bandwidth utilization growth, leading to proactive upgrades on 5 oversubscribed WAN links.
• Environment: Cisco Catalyst 3850/9300, Cisco Nexus 7k/5k, Meraki SD-WAN (MX), F5 BIG-IP LTM, Cisco ISE, Infoblox, BGP, EIGRP, OSPF, HSRP, 802.1x, QoS, NetFlow, ServiceNow, ITIL, Python, Confluence.