Behind the Win: How Jodo Engineered DevOps Excellence

Winning the Engineering Excellence Squad (Financial Services) award at Dine with DevOps III 2025, hosted by Technophiles India, was a moment of pride—and reflection. As our team stood on that stage, holding the award shield, I couldn’t help but reflect on the journey that led us there—one marked by experimentation, hard choices, long nights, and ultimately, shared success.

This post isn’t about the recognition. It’s about the mindset and engineering culture that got us here.

The Why: Scaling DevOps with Security, Cost, and Velocity in Mind

We didn’t set out to win an award. We set out to solve a very real set of problems.

Jodo operates in a space where both speed and trust are non-negotiable. Every release must be fast and flawless. Every system needs to scale without spiraling cloud costs. Every automation must preserve airtight security. It’s a balancing act—and in early 2024, we realized our DevOps practices needed a rethink if we were going to scale responsibly.

This led to a full-scope initiative to evolve our DevOps architecture, which I wrote about in detail in this post. The key goals were clear:

Move to a secure, context-aware secrets management system
Eliminate cloud waste by right-sizing environments and leveraging usage insights
Improve deployment confidence with granular rollback strategies and GitOps-driven workflows
Make observability a first-class citizen

The initiative wasn’t just a technical challenge—it was a cultural one. We needed to shift from a reactive mindset to a proactive one, where we could make informed decisions based on data and insights. This meant investing in tools and processes that would help us make the right choices, even when we didn’t have all the answers.

But as we soon realized, solving these challenges wasn’t just about tools—it was about changing how we worked.

The How: Culture Over Code

One thing I’ve learned leading engineering efforts is this: tools and pipelines matter, but it’s culture that moves the needle.

We didn’t adopt DevSecOps best practices by mandate. Instead, we ran workshops, created working groups, and paired engineers across squads to embed the “why” behind every system design choice. What started as a few tweaks to our Terraform and CI/CD pipelines evolved into a company-wide movement to treat infrastructure as product.

Here are a few principles that helped us stay focused:

We upskilled our backend teams to be closer to what modern DevOps practices look like—deepening their understanding of how systems operate, and empowering them to measure, debug, and optimize what they build.
Bias for automation, but with judgment: Not everything needs to be automated, but everything should be automatable.
Visibility over velocity: Every engineer could trace any deployment, error, or performance anomaly in seconds.
Don’t ship risk: If something felt shaky, we paused. Even at the cost of release velocity.

When it comes to automation, we’ve learned to be intentional—prioritizing impact over coverage. While automation is a powerful enabler, we believe in thoughtful automation—not automation for the sake of it. Every workflow is evaluated based on complexity, frequency, and risk:

High-frequency, low-risk tasks are primary candidates for automation.
Low-frequency, high-risk tasks stay manual or semi-automated to allow for better validation and oversight.
Processes that are still evolving remain manual until they reach a level of maturity that makes automation sustainable.

This approach has helped us avoid brittle systems and maintain confidence across teams as we scale.

The People: Grit, Alignment, and Shared Wins

If there’s one thing this award really represents, it’s the people who made it possible.

This wasn’t an effort led by one team or one person. It was a full-stack commitment by a group of engineers who cared deeply—not just about getting things done, but about doing them the right way.

A huge shoutout to Jayachandra M, Shikhar Chaudhary, Jipson Kannoth, Prabu Murugan, and Sahil Mandaliya—your persistence and craft pushed every system just a bit closer to the ideal. I’ve seen each of you step up, challenge the status quo, and lead from wherever you sit.

To Atulya, Raghav, and Koustav—thank you for the leadership support and for protecting the space we needed to build this properly. Having leadership that understands the compounding value of engineering quality is not something I take for granted.

The Award Ceremony: A Moment That Hit Different

The moment our team name was announced at the Dine with DevOps III event, it all felt real. Standing there with the team, receiving the award, I wasn’t thinking about the architecture diagrams or the deployment scripts—I was thinking about the months of tension-breaking standups, the late Slack threads, the small breakthroughs that no one outside our team will ever notice, but that all added up.

The award shield now sits in our workspace, but its real value is in what it represents. It’s not a finish line—it’s a checkpoint.

Our team on stage receiving the award, and a close-up of the award shield.

What’s Next: Going From Good to Great

Recognition is great, but it’s also fuel. We’re more motivated than ever to take the systems we’ve built and push them further—to be faster without breaking, to scale without wasting, and to keep security at the center of everything.

There’s a lot more we want to experiment with this year:

Extending our zero-trust model deeper into our internal tooling
Investing in platform-as-a-product experiences for developers
Reducing toil in onboarding and local development environments
Refining release engineering to shorten lead time even further

This award marks a milestone. But the real journey is still ahead. We’re not just building systems—we’re building a culture that lasts.

Thanks for reading—and if you’re working on similar challenges, I’d love to hear from you.