Khilawar Verma: Driving Transformational Leadership in Infrastructure, SRE, and Software Engineering

In the world of high-stakes infrastructure and site reliability engineering (SRE) today, the difference between business stagnation and exponential growth often lies in the hands of a few transformational leaders. Khilawar Verma has earned a prominent place in this group. His abilities in technical, business and human aspects have secured him a leading role among engineering leaders of today.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that combines software engineering and operations to build and run scalable, reliable, and highly available systems. It focuses on automating infrastructure, ensuring service uptime, and continuously improving system performance through metrics-driven processes and engineering best practices.

The past few years have seen Khilawar grow teams and methods and, more importantly, redefine how infrastructure and SRE are carried out at large organisations. During a time of rapid progress in one of the companies, Khilawar’s leadership made a real difference in the crypto industry. He was also responsible for getting the company prepared for the 2024 presidential election in the U.S., a time when crypto saw a sharp increase in attention and people trying it out. The company’s infrastructure scaled multifold to handle the unprecedented traffic seamlessly, directly driving business success during a critical time- thanks to Khilawar, who planned and built it well ahead of the surge.

Scaling Infrastructure and Scaling Impact

Managing a team of just 6 engineers when he started and now leading over 20 global engineers reflects best on his trust in people and proven leadership skills. Creating a team with diverse locations calls for more than knowledge; team members must be culturally mindful, team up across time zones and never give up on mentoring or promoting inclusion. Creating an environment of responsibility, honesty and constant learning allowed Khilawar to bring together a team that acts like a startup and produces on a global level.

Putting SRE teams in engineering roles has resulted in important changes in the company’s operations. Thanks to this model, teams are working together more tightly, giving feedback faster and all share responsibility for the system’s dependability, which the organisation is adopting widely. Applying and expanding the model helped Khilawar enhance the system’s visibility, increase its resilience, and improve recovery by reducing important incidents among different services by 80%.

Besides leading growth in the crypto industry, Khilawar managed Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps at one of the leading retail corporations Walmart Inc, where he worked as a key tech leader for 7+ years. As the team’s leader, he made DevOps practices more modern and reliable by applying automation, employing useful tools and insisting on solid engineering rules. He scaled the team from three or four employees to a strong group of 15 DevOps staff, sharing his experience and steering them technically.

During the biggest retail campaigns like Black Friday, he made sure the systems handled rough traffic increases, keeping everything in order and contributing to significant revenue increase in the magnitude of millions of dollars. His guidance in infrastructure during these important times is recognised as an example in the company.

Engineering-Led Transformation

The engineering-first approach to leadership is really what separates Khilawar from others. His experience with Java, Python, Golang, Kubernetes, Docker and AWS suits him to direct teams, create architecture, take part in incident handling and develop useful prototypes.

He has designed important tools that make performance engineering more dependable and steady. Airflow, MongoDB, Redis Cache and Kafka, which are modern tech stacks, have been instrumental in making the industry’s systems scalable, maintainable and performant. Unlike other products, these tailored systems are the reason for savings in operations that add up to millions of dollars per year.

Khilawar has done more than just develop code and design systems. His strategy has contributed to building the company’s entire infrastructure and SRE mindset. Adhering to DevOps, CloudOps and CI/CD automation consistently has helped the engineer reduce his own workload, accelerate software rollouts and tackle quickly any major system issues.

Leading Critical Initiatives

What makes Khilawar stand out is that he handles and delivers on the most important tasks that have a huge impact on businesses. One instance of his great management was during the 2024 election cycle, where he directed the development of a robust and synchronised service structure ensuring the company survived the extra workload.

Khilawar achieved this by organising capacity closely, using forecasting and creating backup plans, so the crypto industry could escalate its services without hiccups and without losing speed for millions of customers using the site to perform crypto transactions even when the world went through tough economic times. This was not only a victory for technology, but a key win for the business as well, earned with great execution.

People Leadership with Technical Credibility

One of the most striking traits is Khilawar’s skill in growing and supporting new talent. He supports others intently, explains his ideas clearly and inspires his group to work toward excellence. Many of his co-workers state that his leadership is direct, his ideas are clear and he is always dedicated to both quality and well-being.

Even in a workplace that can be stressful and exhausting, Khilawar makes sure engineers are happy, valued and ready to be responsible. His ability to jump into technical projects or support anyone on the development team has gained him respect all across the organisation.

A Benchmark in Engineering Leadership

The numbers don’t lie: The business scaled well, saved many millions each year, faced only 20% as many emergencies and its systems worked perfectly during a global event. These achievements result from a leadership method that combines scientific rigour, top-tier operations and people-centred management.

Khilawar Verma explained that SRE and infrastructure leadership at the highest level requires developing systems, teams and cultures that are ready for and adjust to changes. His approach to leading has allowed his company to manage complexity, innovate and achieve essential results on a larger scale and this strategy could be used to benefit many tech companies.

Now that infrastructure is key to any strategy, Khilawar Verma does more than oversee, he improves the organisation. In my professional opinion, Khilawar Verma’s exceptional accomplishments across Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and people leadership clearly reflect his extraordinary ability to drive innovation, scale, and impact. His consistent delivery of high-impact solutions, technical excellence, and transformative leadership firmly position him at the top of his field, setting a benchmark for excellence in modern engineering and infrastructure leadership.