Kamal CHERIYATH
Platform Engineering • Cloud Architecture • Developer Experience
I have over twenty years' experience building enterprise platforms and enabling engineering teams, with a career spanning software engineering, architecture, platform product management, and Platform Engineering. I'm currently a Principal Engineer responsible for Hosting and Developer Platforms at Marks & Spencer.
I enjoy solving complex engineering problems and turning them into scalable platform capabilities that simplify how software is built, deployed, and operated. My work combines technical strategy with hands-on engineering, helping build modern cloud platforms, improve developer experience, and deliver change through reusable, product-oriented platforms.
Experience
Strategy and Architecture
Platform Strategy & Roadmaps Aligning platform strategy and technology with engineering and business priorities, balancing innovation, and long-term sustainability.
Enterprise & Cloud Architecture Designing secure, scalable multi-cloud platforms using Well-Architected principles.
Platform Transformation Driving Platform Engineering adoption through modern operating models, standards, and reusable platform capabilities.
Distributed Systems Architecting resilient multi-region platforms for global scale, availability, and disaster recovery.
Platform Engineering
Platform as a Product Building Internal Developer Platforms that enable self-service, standardised delivery, and an improved developer experience.
DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering Embedding DevOps and SRE practices to improve delivery, reliability, and operational resilience.
Platform Automation & AI Delivering declarative infrastructure, policy-driven automation, and intent-based platform workflows.
Observability Creating unified platform observability through telemetry, monitoring, alerting, and operational insights.
Technical Leadership & Influence
Technical Direction Providing technical leadership across architecture, platform strategy, and engineering initiatives.
Stakeholder Alignment Working with engineering, product, security, and executive stakeholders to align technology with business outcomes.
Large-Scale Delivery Leading complex platform transformation programmes across distributed engineering organisations.
Mentoring & Engineering Culture Coaching engineers, promoting engineering standards, and encouraging pragmatic, collaborative decision-making.
Operational Excellence
Cloud Operations Operating cloud-native platforms with automation, resilience, security, and operational maturity.
Reliability & Performance Designing highly available platforms that improve reliability, scalability, and service performance.
FinOps & Sustainability Optimising cloud investment through FinOps, right-sizing, and sustainable engineering practices.
Secure by Design Embedding security, governance, and policy into platforms by default.
Career History
Principal Engineer for Hosting and Developer Platforms
- Leading the architectural rebuild of hosting and developer platforms following a high-profile cyber incident.
- Re-founding the platform on secure-by-default and private-by-default principles rather than retrofitting security onto existing patterns.
- Enforcing Zero Trust, micro-segmentation, and least-privilege as platform-level guarantees rather than team-by-team implementation choices, so developers inherit the security posture by using the platform rather than having to build it themselves.
- Defining the next evolution of Platform UX, moving from a self-service catalogue of discrete infrastructure components to intent-based provisioning, where developers declare workload requirements (compute, data, connectivity, compliance posture) as part of their application config, and the platform derives and provisions the underlying infrastructure automatically.
- Architecting multi-region platform foundations designed around resilience and recoverability as first-order requirements, directly informed by lessons from the incident.
- Leading the platform engineering organisation through simultaneous security remediation and platform modernisation, balancing urgent hardening work with longer-term architectural direction.
Cloud Platform Engineering Lead
- Led the strategy and engineering of Cloud9, the enterprise cloud platform supporting over £35m annual cloud investment.
- Conceived and delivered Muziris, an Internal Developer Platform providing self-service, automation, and engineering standards to 2,000+ developers, cutting platform onboarding from weeks to hours.
- Engineered platform accelerators CloudSeeder and BlueSky, IaC (Terraform)-based reference implementations for Azure Kubernetes (AKS), serverless, networking, and identity that reduced time-to-first-deploy across teams.
- Designed Azure landing zones aligned to the Cloud Adoption Framework and Well-Architected principles, policy-as-code guardrails, and hub-and-spoke network topology for secure, repeatable adoption.
- Embedded DevSecOps and GitOps (Terraform, Flux, CI/CD) practices alongside Privileged Identity Management, reducing configuration drift and reinforcing full lifecycle ownership across hosted Azure platforms (VMs, AKS).
- Defined an AI landing zone enabling scale-out capacity with data sovereignty and security controls; architected PercyGPT, an Azure OpenAI-based reference implementation for AI applications and a precursor to Copilot.
- Introduced Platform health metrics, scorecards, and unified observability, giving leadership real-time visibility into reliability, cost, and engineering effectiveness.
- Introduced FinOps and sustainability initiatives to Platforms, automated cost visibility and cost-performance trade-offs.
- Built global engineering teams and managed strategic cloud and technology partnerships, shaping long-term platform strategy.
Product Manager, Azure Foundation & Cloud Integration Frameworks
- Defined the product strategy and roadmap for Azure Foundation, Cloud Integration, and enterprise B2B platform capabilities.
- Evolved Azure Foundation into a self-service platform for Kubernetes, serverless, and cloud-native workloads.
- Delivered API, event-driven, and integration frameworks that accelerated application modernisation and migration to Azure.
- Established platform capabilities and engineering standards that achieved an independent integration maturity rating of 4+/5, placing the organisation amongst the industry's highest performers.
Lead Architect, Application Integration
- Defined enterprise architecture, reference models, and technical standards for messaging, APIs, data integration, and hybrid cloud.
- Established architectural principles and governance that enabled consistent delivery across on-premises and cloud platforms.
- Served as Design Authority for the integration domain, providing architecture assurance and technical guidance for enterprise programmes.
- Partnered with engineering and programme teams to shape integration strategy and support major transformation initiatives.
Engineer, Technical Lead & Architect
- Progressed through engineering, technical leadership, and architecture roles delivering enterprise solutions across financial services and retail.
- Worked with organisations including Merrill Lynch, BlackRock, and ABN AMRO, on large-scale platforms and integration programmes.
- Led engineering centres of excellence, establishing technical standards, mentoring engineers, and promoting best practices.
- Provided technical consultancy, pre-sales support, and architectural leadership across global delivery teams.