Prahlad Kumar Sharma
git log --oneline career.history

Two decades. Four companies. Zero data loss.

From early-career L2 support to technology lead for a Government of India financial enterprise — every role chosen to deepen the craft and broaden the leadership scope toward IT Director / CTO.

Deputy Manager — IT · Technology Lead (IT Director track)

UTI Infrastructure Technology & Services Ltd (UTIITSL)
Government of India · SEBI Category I Registrar & Transfer Agent
Sep 2012 — Present

Own the data and platform layer behind real-time financial transaction processing, NAV computation, and regulatory reporting for 100+ mutual fund AMCs and corporate registries. Lead engineers and vendors, brief executives and auditors, sponsor multi-quarter modernization programs.

// technology_leadership_strategy

Technology Leadership & Strategy

  • Set the multi-year platform roadmap covering database, OS, cloud posture, observability, and DR — aligned to SEBI / regulatory mandates and business growth.
  • Lead a cross-functional team of engineers, operators, and vendor resources running 24×7 production for nation-scale financial workloads.
  • Brief senior leadership, statutory auditors, and Change Advisory Boards on architecture, risk, and incident posture in plain business language.
  • Own SLA / SLO / SLI for Tier-1 systems; chair post-incident reviews; institutionalize learnings across the organization.
// modernization_major_programs

Modernization & Major Programs

  • Sponsored and led the largest platform upgrade in org history: zero-downtime modernization of 100+ database servers (MySQL 5.7 → 8.0) with concurrent OS upgrade (RHEL 6.10 → 9.7). Zero data loss, zero SLA breach.
  • Designed end-to-end high-availability topology across production, staging, and Business Continuity Center environments — eliminating SPOFs in financial transaction processing.
  • Architected multi-tier replication and read-replica strategy to offload analytics from OLTP, improving throughput and unlocking new reporting capabilities for the business.
  • Drove evaluation and adoption path for cloud-native data services (OCI / MySQL HeatWave / managed cloud DB) within regulated boundaries.
// performance_capacity_at_scale

Performance & Capacity at Scale

  • Resolved P0 incidents on 500M+ row financial tables — query latency reduced from >30s to <200ms through index and schema redesign.
  • Drove 40–60% throughput improvement on peak NAV workloads via tuning of buffer pool, thread concurrency, and connection pools.
  • Instituted schema design reviews and capacity planning practice across product squads (partitioning, index selectivity, normalization).
// business_continuity_dr

Business Continuity & DR

  • Own the enterprise backup, restore, and DR strategy — full weekly + differential daily + incremental hourly. RPO ≤ 15 min for Tier-1 systems.
  • Run quarterly DR drills validating RTO ≤ 1 hour for full production restoration from offsite repositories.
  • Built an automated backup-verification pipeline (restore-to-sandbox + checksums) — turned DR from a slide into a tested operating capability.
// security_compliance_governance

Security, Compliance & Governance

  • Enterprise audit on all privileged activity — ISO 27001 aligned audit trails accepted by statutory auditors.
  • Rolled out role-based access across 200+ accounts; eliminated direct superuser usage in application connection strings.
  • TLS-everywhere posture for application-to-data channels; org-wide password and key rotation policy.
  • ITIL / ISO 20000 compliant change governance — runbooks, rollback plans, impact assessments, CAB ownership.
// oracle_estate_production_

Oracle Estate (Production)

  • Operate mission-critical Oracle 8i / 9i / 11g on Solaris underpinning financial clearing — 99.95%+ uptime.
  • Implemented Oracle Data Guard Active Standby with <4 hour RTO for full site failover.
  • RMAN catalog-based backups with automated archive log pruning, standby sync, monthly validation.

Senior Oracle DBA · Global Estate Lead

HCL Technologies Ltd · Client: SanDisk Inc. (Western Digital)
Global Oracle estate of 350+ databases across AIX, Linux, Solaris, Windows
Jan 2012 — Sep 2012

Delivered Oracle services for SanDisk's global estate supporting engineering, ERP, and supply chain for one of the world's largest flash storage manufacturers — operating across timezones and business units.

// highlights

Highlights

  • Operated heterogeneous Oracle estate (8i–11g) across four operating systems — production stability for SAP ERP and supply chain systems.
  • Administered SAP/R3 Oracle DBs using SAPDBA and BRTOOLS — zero SAP application downtime during maintenance windows.
  • Built automated monitoring for tablespace, archive log, blocking session detection — measurably reduced MTTR.
  • Applied Oracle CPU/PSU patches via rolling methodology across multi-node environments.

Oracle DBA · RAC / ASM Lead

HCL Technologies Ltd · Client: Direct Brands Inc. / Bookspan (USA)
200+ Oracle 9i/10g/11g databases (RAC + ASM) — direct-to-consumer media at scale
Dec 2007 — Jan 2012

Supported the largest direct-to-consumer media distributor in North America, processing millions of membership transactions daily. Owned the database tier for high-volume OLTP and analytics refreshes.

// highlights

Highlights

  • Ran Oracle RAC clusters with ASM — active-active HA for high-volume OLTP. Interconnect tuning, voting disks, OCR.
  • Designed RMAN backup architecture with incremental merge — 35% backup window reduction vs. full-backup-only approach.
  • Reduced refresh cycle (prod → 5 non-prod) from 8 hours to 3 hours via parallelism and compression — material productivity gain for QA and dev.
  • 24×7 on-call for US-East client from India — block corruption, ORA-600, RAC node failures, no missed SLA.

Technical Support Executive (L2) · Customer Operations

Sutherland Global Services · Clients: AT&T & HP
Foundational enterprise customer operations & escalation management
Feb 2007 — Oct 2007

Early-career foundation in structured troubleshooting, escalation management, and customer-first operations — the discipline I still expect from the teams I lead today.