Akash Thakur

Technology Leader | Architect | SRE | Ultra Low Latency System

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.

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.

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.

Maplin E-Commerce | Retail Systems Overhaul | 2016 – 2017

Replaced SAP-centric monoliths with asynchronous, distributed microservices achieving 99.99% reliability during Black Friday events.
Implemented high-speed search platforms using Elasticsearch and custom analyzers, improving user query latency by 45%.
Introduced blue-green deployment pipelines and observability hooks with zero-downtime rollbacks and business continuity assurance.