darshak

• Operated validator, full, and archive node fleets for a high-throughput EVM Layer 1, including provisioning, config management, and 24/7 on-call. • Owned chain upgrades and hard forks end to end: genesis/config generation, coordinated rollout across validators and RPC nodes, rollback plans, and post-upgrade verification of block production. • Ran production RPC/WebSocket/archive endpoints behind load balancers with rate limiting, caching, and per-consumer quotas. • Built infrastructure as code with Terraform and Ansible across bare metal and cloud; ran Kubernetes for stateless services and dedicated hosts for latency-critical nodes. • Built CI/CD (GitLab CI/GitHub Actions) for protocol repos and smart contracts: reproducible builds, artifact signing, deterministic deploys, and devnet -> testnet -> mainnet canary rollout. • Built observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, and Loki; defined SLOs on block height lag, peer count, missed blocks, reorg depth, and RPC latency/error rate. • Led chain-level incident response (halts, forks, peer storms, state bloat, DDoS) through to verified recovery; wrote runbooks and postmortems and repaired alert routing rather than silencing alerts. • Managed validator keys with HSM/KMS signing, slashing-protection databases, separation of duties, and documented rotation and recovery. • Hardened infrastructure with network segmentation, sentry-node topology, least-privilege IAM, Vault-based secrets management, and image/dependency scanning. • Supported ecosystem services - explorer, indexers/subgraphs, bridge relayers, multisig operations, partner RPC - with monitoring and on-call cover. • Built blockchain data pipelines, state/config backups, and tested restores; handled capacity planning and cost optimisation across compute, storage, and egress. • Automated recurring toil (health checks, backups, cert/DNS rotation, node inventory, access reviews) and mentored engineers joining on-call.