About Me
Engineer. Leader. Builder of things that scale and last.
Software Engineer with 15+ years building scalable, cloud-native platforms in regulated, high-stakes environments - from major Australian banks to fast-growing startups. I'm driven by lifelong learning, elegant problem-solving, and the craft of continuous improvement.
My core expertise spans cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes platform engineering (EKS, ROSA, AKS - with Kyverno, OPA, KRO, and custom operators via Kubebuilder), and AI/ML integrations (RAG, AI agents, LLM Ops). Deeply hands-on with IaC, GitOps, DevSecOps, policy-as-code, and building paved roads that teams love to work on.
- Experienced in compliance-driven delivery - CPS 230, PCI-DSS, and ISO 27001 environments.
- Pragmatic pragmatist: I value maintainability, observability, and developer experience above all.
- Bias for shipping - iterate fast, measure everything, and improve relentlessly.
AI Journey
From experimentation to production-grade AI systems
Built production RAG pipelines using OpenAI, Claude, and open-source LLMs with vector stores (Pinecone, pgvector) for grounded, context-aware responses - powering internal knowledge bases, customer-facing chat assistants, and document Q&A systems.
Designed and deployed multi-agent orchestration systems using n8n, LangGraph, and custom tooling - agents that browse the web, process documents, trigger APIs, write and execute code, and make decisions autonomously in pipelines.
End-to-end AI media pipelines: transcript analysis → script generation → text-to-speech (ElevenLabs) → AI image/video generation (Replicate, Runway, Shotstack) → automated publishing. Built for YouTube, Instagram, and internal comms.
Built the infrastructure layer for AI - GPU-optimised Kubernetes workloads, model serving with vLLM and Ollama, prompt versioning, token tracking, cost observability, and guardrails for production LLM deployments.
Engineering Leadership
Shipping real outcomes at scale, with and through great teams
Led cross-functional platform engineering squads of 8–15 engineers across cloud, SRE, and security disciplines. Defined team topologies, set engineering standards, ran sprint ceremonies, and mentored senior, mid, and junior engineers - fostering a culture of ownership, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
Delivered a multi-year cloud platform migration and modernisation programme at a major Australian bank - encompassing ROSA/EKS multi-cluster GitOps, secrets management (Vault), observability uplift (Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana), DR strategies, and APRA CPS 230 compliance attestation. Coordinated across architecture, security, risk, and delivery leads.
Partnered with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and product leaders to shape multi-quarter technical roadmaps. Translated business priorities into engineering initiatives, managed trade-offs between velocity and risk, and drove alignment across distributed stakeholders. Comfortable presenting to executives and board-level risk committees.
Built and grew engineering teams from the ground up - owning hiring end-to-end, running technical interviews, setting onboarding practices, and delivering structured 1:1 coaching. Champions a blameless post-mortem culture, internal tech talks, and a strong "paved road" approach to developer experience.
Core Stack & Tools
Want to see the projects and platforms I've shipped? Jump to the portfolio.
About Sanjeev Maharjan - Engineering Leader & Manager
With over 15 years in technology and a decade leading cloud-native engineering teams, Sanjeev Maharjan has established himself as a trusted Engineering Leader & Manager across enterprise banking, fintech, and technology organisations in Australia. Based in Sydney, he brings both strategic vision and hands-on technical depth - from setting platform direction and growing engineering teams to personally architecting production Kubernetes deployments and AI-integrated infrastructure pipelines.
Platform Engineering Expertise
Sanjeev's core expertise spans the full cloud-native stack: Kubernetes (EKS, ROSA, AKS), Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, Flux, Terraform, and Crossplane. He has delivered production Kubernetes platforms in regulated Australian banking environments operating under APRA CPS 230 and ISO 27001 compliance requirements - where security, audit trails, and zero-downtime delivery are non-negotiable.
In the custom operator space, he has written production-grade operators using Kubebuilder and the newer KRO (Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator) framework, enabling self-healing, declarative management of complex application lifecycle across multi-cluster environments.
Policy, Security & Governance
Governance-by-code is a key principle. Using Kyverno and OPA Gatekeeper, policy enforcement is automated at the admission controller level - catching misconfigurations before they reach production clusters. This approach reduces manual security reviews and builds a consistent, auditable compliance posture across hundreds of namespaces and workloads.
AI, Machine Learning & LLM Engineering
Beyond infrastructure, Sanjeev works extensively in AI/ML engineering - building RAG pipelines, LLM agent orchestration, and embedding-based retrieval systems using Python, LangChain, and vector databases. These systems bridge the gap between enterprise data and modern language models, enabling intelligent, context-aware applications at production scale.
Background & Approach
Sanjeev brings both Go and Python programming experience to the table - writing operators, CLI tools, data pipelines, and AI agents with the same engineering rigor applied to infrastructure. His background spans SRE practices, DevOps transformation, and platform product thinking, making him effective across the full delivery lifecycle.
View selected projects and open-source work, or reach out to discuss an engagement.