Vikram Nair

Senior Linux systems administrator — 400 servers, one pager, no surprises

Senior Linux Systems Administrator · Meridian Hosting

Professional Summary

Twelve years keeping Linux fleets boring: patching, hardening, monitoring and recovery for hosting and fintech companies. I automate the second time I do anything and I rehearse the restore before I trust the backup.

Work Experience

Senior Linux Systems Administrator, Meridian Hosting

Kochi · Apr 2021 – Present

Fleet of 400 servers across two data centres and one cloud region; on-call lead for a team of five.

99.995 % availability across the fleet in 2025
Cut the monthly patching window from 6 hours to 40 minutes with live kernel patching and Ansible
Rebuilt backups: every restore rehearsed weekly by a bot that files a ticket when one fails

Linux Administrator, Paylane

Bengaluru · Feb 2017 – Mar 2021

Ran the PCI-scoped servers of a payments company: hardening, logging, change control.

Passed four PCI DSS audits with zero findings on the Linux estate
Replaced hand-built servers with Kickstart + Ansible images

Junior Systems Administrator, Kerala Netlink

Kochi · Jun 2014 – Jan 2017

Mail, DNS, web hosting and the help desk for a regional ISP.

Education

B.Tech, Information Technology, Cochin University of Science and Technology

Jul 2010 – May 2014

Skills

Linux (RHEL, Debian), Bash, systemd, KVM / libvirt, Ansible, Python, Terraform, Nginx / HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Prometheus / Grafana, Networking (BGP, VLAN, WireGuard), Security hardening (CIS)

Certifications

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) — Red Hat, May 2022
LPIC-2 — Linux Professional Institute, Sep 2018
Certified Kubernetes Administrator — CNCF, Mar 2024 (valid to Mar 2027)

Projects

patchwatch — Author

2024 – present

An Ansible-driven patching pipeline with canary hosts, automatic rollback and a Grafana board per wave. Open source, used by three other hosting teams.

https://example.com/patchwatch

restore-bot — Author

2023

Restores a random backup every night into an isolated VM, checks it, and files a ticket when anything differs.

Home lab — Owner

2019 – present

Twelve nodes, Proxmox, Ceph and a WireGuard mesh — where every change gets tried first.

Achievements

99.995 % fleet availability in 2025, 2025. 400 servers, two data centres, one cloud region.
Patching window 6 h → 40 min, 2024
Four PCI DSS audits, zero Linux findings, 2017 – 2021

Publications

Live kernel patching without the drama — Personal blog, Feb 2025 https://example.com/kpatch
Test the restore, not the backup — SysAdvent, Dec 2023 https://example.com/restore

Languages

Malayalam (Native), English (Fluent), Hindi (Conversational)