Sai Teja Penugonda

I had the pleasure of working with Sai Teja Penugonda as his manager, and skip level manager, since his time as Cloud Support Engineer, and as a dotted line manager when he served as a Senior Support Engineer on Containers Service Experience Owner team at AWS throughout 2024, and 2025. Sai excelled as a Continuous Improvement Service Experience Owner for EKS and ECS, consistently delivering exceptional results across three key areas: Technical Excellence & Customer Impact: Sai led complex customer engagements including multi-day workshops on EKS Auto Mode, ECS Predictive Auto Scaling, and Terraform implementations. His deep expertise in Kubernetes (holding CKA, CKAD, CKS, and KCNA certifications) enabled him to handle sophisticated container orchestration challenges and deliver high-impact training that empowered customers to operate independently. Operational Leadership: Sai managed critical escalations and complex customer issues with exceptional skill. He served as the Proactive Services Lead globally and as Dep/DMS Scrum Lead for AMER, demonstrating strong leadership across multiple operational dimensions while maintaining excellence in customer engagement. Team Development & Knowledge Sharing: Sai's commitment to elevating others is remarkable. He mentored five engineers to SME level, served as an ECS SME Bootcamp Instructor, and led the EKS Bootcamp preparation efforts. He authored advanced security content for EKS knowledge articles and led documentation review sprints, significantly improving support resources for the entire organization. Sai combines deep technical expertise in container technologies with exceptional leadership and a genuine passion for developing others. Any organization would be fortunate to have him on their team.

Mohamed Zaghloul Sr. Technical Operations Manager, Amazon AWS, Support Engineering View on LinkedIn

Having collaborated with Sai on a number of projects, I've found his strong ownership and deep experience with both EKS and various AWS Services to be exceptional. He leverages data to identify opportunities and collaborates effectively with other team members. His comprehensive understanding of AWS Services equips him with the ability to tackle problems from various perspectives. Sai will prove to be an invaluable asset for any organization seeking an engineer with deep technical expertise, someone capable of driving initiatives and projects with strong sense of ownership.

Carlos Orozco Sr. Manager at AWS | AWS Certified Cloud, AI Practitioner, and Solutions Architect View on LinkedIn

I worked with Sai on various cloud development issues where he was the SME. Sai was always helpful and made himself available to help others to ensure tasks and projects were completed. He is always great to work with and wants to make sure you understand the technology you are working with. I look forward to working with him again in the future.

David Kelly Senior DevOps Engineer at Capital One View on LinkedIn

Sai worked with me in Capital One for about 2 years. Sai has supported my team with AWS, Docker, Jenkins, CICD, Groovy, Python and many more. He is a quick learner and always eager to stay up to date with new features and enhancements. He has built CICD pipelines for our platform along with suggesting teams to use better practice for Docker and Github. I really want to thanks and appreciate him for all his hard work to make our platform better. Thanks for bringing in positive attitude and energy in the team all the time. Good Luck.

Bijender Singh Enterprise Security Architect | Cloud Architect at Federal Reserve Bank View on LinkedIn

I had the pleasure of working with Sai at Capital One implementing Kubernetes for a multi-container Java application. Sai is a very talented engineer with a great personality. He is not only great at learning new things, implementing code, and setting up meetings, he's also a great person to work with. We could use more people like Sai in the industry! Anyone would be very lucky to get the opportunity to work with him.

Jesse Corson Principal Software Engineer View on LinkedIn