Xavier Murias
Experience
06.2019 - 01.2021Prudential PACSSingapore
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SRE Manager (Principal Engineer)

Modernised a regulated financial institution from on-prem to cloud-native and fully DevOps — with the cost line coming down alongside. Drove a TRM 2021-aligned SDLC, lifted the legacy WebSphere and JBoss estate into AKS, and took end-to-end ownership of the infrastructure budget through the PMO.

9 direct reportsSREArchitecture
Key wins
OnPrem to cloud-native
Full DevOps implementation
Complete containerization
MAS TRM 2021-aligned SDLC
Technologies
KubernetesOCPTerraformPythonPrometheusGrafanaEFKKafkaZookeeperOpenFaaSAKSJenkinsCassandraStolon
Responsibilities & achievements

Drove a 100-year-old regulated financial institution from on-prem and early DevOps into a cloud-native, containerised operating model in almost two years. End-to-end PMO ownership delivered structural savings across cloud, licensing, and augmentation:

  • Leading a team of nine across SRE and Architecture squads — zero attrition during my tenure, and a materially shortened SLA turnaround on infrastructure tasks, driven by upskilling the team through certifications (CKA, CKAD, Terraform Associate, etc.)
  • OnPrem to Cloud Migrations Expertise — Planning, Architecture, End-to-End Execution
  • Containerisation and migration of legacy platforms — moved IBM WebSphere and JBoss workloads off OpenShift and VMs into AKS, containers only
  • Evolved Jenkins to behave like Drone-CI — declarative-YAML pipelines
  • TRM-aligned SDLC — crafted Prudential's SDLC covering DevOps, Agile, Pipelines, Artifact Lineage, and CAB, aligned with the MAS TRM 2021 Act (Monetary Authority of Singapore)
  • COVID WFH enablement — played a crucial role making sure thousands of employees could work from home safely as the pandemic started
  • Automation Specialist (CI/CD, Terraform, Python, DevSecOps)
  • Resilient stateful workloads — introduced Kafka self-hosted via the Confluent Kubernetes Operator and Stolon-managed self-hosted Postgres clusters; production StatefulSets with CSI-backed persistence
  • Production-grade MVP on AKS — OpenFaaS + Kafka + Cassandra, with autoscaling and full instrumentation through ElasticSearch + Prometheus + Grafana
  • Performance and production incident troubleshooting
  • Solutions Architecture — re-engineering and new platforms toward cloud-native and containerised, while maintaining a cost-efficient footprint