Akash Thakur
Akash Thakur

Technology Leader | SRE Architect (Performance and Security) | AI Integration with SRE and Application Performance

SRE Architect (Performance and Security)

Teacher Retirement System of NYC | Global Infrastructure & Capital Markets | 2018 – Present

  • Designed and institutionalized an enterprise SRE operating model adopted across business domains, reducing critical incident frequency by 70%.
  • Implemented dynamic SLO frameworks and platform-wide SLIs, shifting organizational culture from reactive firefighting to proactive engineering.
  • Built a globally distributed SRE CoE, mentoring 100+ engineers and delivering internal SRE certifications in partnership with external governing bodies.
  • Negotiated and governed cross-vendor SLAs with key hyperscalers, ensuring cloud cost optimization and regulatory compliance across hybrid deployments.

IT Architect- Platform & Observability Transformation

HealthFirst | Healthcare Systems Modernization | 2017 – 2018

  • Designed a modular microservices mesh integrated with custom observability nodes, reducing production defects by 42% in the first 6 months.
  • Rolled out AI-driven observability pipelines for predictive alerting, reducing MTTR by 68% and supporting high-stakes compliance use cases.
  • Spearheaded the cloud migration blueprint for patient data systems to GCP using a service mesh pattern aligned with HIPAA and HITRUST.
  • Enforced observability-first engineering by building governance layers for structured logs, distributed traces, and metric instrumentation.
  • Piloted a fault injection program that stress-tested mission-critical workloads, resulting in the creation of gold-standard runbooks and game-day exercises.

NFT Manager- Simplification Program (Performance, Security & Resilience)

Lloyds Banking Group | Financial Platform Resilience | 2013 – 2016

  • Rebuilt the entire transaction layer of retail banking systems to adopt event-sourcing, increasing throughput by 10x and eliminating batch outages.
  • Integrated real-time compliance telemetry into all critical transaction systems, enabling continuous MiFID II adherence.
  • Partnered with the Bank of England and internal InfoSec teams to redesign cryptographic fault boundaries across services and eliminate cross-system failure cascades.
  • Championed the organization’s first multi-region failover framework with active-active DR strategy, enabling 100% availability during peak market turbulence.