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Alan Joy — Software Engineer

Linux server administration & managed hosting (L2/L3 support) · Kochi, Kerala, India

Alan Joy

Alan Joy

Software Engineer — Server Support

  • Employer Bobcares
  • Tier L2 / L3 escalation
  • Experience 2 years
  • Location Kochi, Kerala, India
  • Phone +91 62825 70219
  • Email alanjoy905@gmail.com
Get in touch

How I got here

I graduated in Computer Science & Engineering in 2024 and joined Bobcares in Kochi that August as a junior software engineer on web hosting and server support. Two years on I handle L2/L3 escalations across shared, VPS and dedicated Linux servers for a global managed-hosting client base.

Support is a useful place to learn, because it teaches you the difference between a fix that makes the alert go away and a fix that makes the problem go away. The tickets that reach me have usually already defeated someone else, so guessing isn't an option — you read the logs, attribute the load, and prove what happened.

The work splits three ways. Escalations and incidents: high-load events on production nodes, mail and DNS failures, compromise investigation and cleanup. Recovery: InnoDB corruption, disk-full damage, data rebuilt from pre-rebuild snapshots. Planned change: PHP and platform upgrades, cPanel-to-cPanel and DigitalOcean-to-AWS migrations with tested rollback paths.

I'm currently extending into DevOps and cloud — AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate are both in progress, with GCP after that.

How I work

  • Read before you touch. Logs, monitoring history and change records come before any command that modifies state.
  • Backup before you break. No destructive operation goes ahead without a verified, restorable copy — and I've tested the restore, not just the backup job.
  • Rollback plan first. The maintenance window doesn't open until the "how do we undo this" step is written down.
  • Least privilege by default. Root is a last resort, not a starting point. Same for open ports and firewall exceptions.
  • Write it down. Every non-trivial incident ends in an RCA the customer can actually read. Undocumented fixes come back.
  • Automate the second time. Do it manually once to understand it, then script it so it's consistent forever.
Career

Professional experience

Roles, responsibilities and what actually changed because I was there.

Aug 2025 — Present

Software Engineer — Web Hosting & Server Support

Bobcares · Infrastructure Management Services · Kochi

  • Escalation ownership: L2/L3 tickets across shared, VPS and dedicated Linux servers for a global managed-hosting client base — first alert through root cause, fix and written client RCA.
  • Server migration lead: planned and executed a PHP 5.6 → 8.2 platform migration for a high-traffic AWS client (Ubuntu 24.04, Apache 2.4, MariaDB 10.11, ~176 GB database) with header-based ALB dry-run routing, full dump/restore DB sync, a Gitolite auto-deploy pipeline and a seconds-level target-group rollback path.
  • Performance & load incidents: resolved sustained high-load events on 8–24 core production nodes (load 45–80) by attributing I/O and CPU with pidstat, iostat and sar — traced to scanner bursts under PHP-CGI without LVE caps, oversized IMAP maildirs holding Dovecot index locks, and EXT4 metadata corruption resolved via a datacenter-coordinated offline fsck.
  • Emergency data recovery: recovered WooCommerce order, tax, attribute and shipping data across multiple sites after a disk-full event caused InnoDB corruption and a MariaDB rebuild on a DirectAdmin server, working from pre-rebuild data-directory snapshots.
  • Security incident response: investigated and contained active compromises involving rogue systemd services, /etc/ld.so.preload hooks, hidden payload fetchers, webshells and crypto-mining processes; forensic log analysis, cleanup and post-incident hardening on WordPress and Joomla environments.
Aug 2024 — Aug 2025

Junior Software Engineer

Bobcares · Infrastructure Management Services · Kochi

  • Hardening & prevention: deployed ModSecurity vendor rulesets with CSF auto-ban triggers, Fail2Ban on non-standard SSH ports with firewalld, KernelCare live patching and firewall rule optimisation to cut repeat incidents.
  • Migrations & backups: executed cPanel-to-cPanel and DigitalOcean-to-AWS EC2 moves with post-migration validation — curl status sweeps, path and permission fixes; managed backup schedules, restores and disk-space remediation.
  • Mail, DNS & SSL: troubleshot delivery and authentication issues across Exim, Postfix and Dovecot (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, blacklist delisting), plus DNS records, certificate renewal and manual AutoSSL recovery via acme.sh.
  • Monitoring: maintained Zabbix, Grafana and Nagios coverage across multi-server fleets, tuning alert thresholds and running proactive health sweeps.
Nov 2022 — Dec 2022

Project Intern

Exposys Data Labs · Bengaluru

  • Built an IoT plant-watering automation system using Arduino and soil-moisture sensors for automated water-level regulation.
2020 — 2024

B.Tech, Computer Science & Engineering

St. Joseph's College of Engineering and Technology, Palai

  • APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University
  • 7.5 CGPA — First Class
2018 — 2020

Higher Secondary (10+2), Computer Science

Holy Cross HSS, Cherpunkal, Kerala

  • 96.5%
Certifications

Professional credentials

Security · Linux · Cloud

  • Foundations of Cybersecurity — IBM
  • Introduction to Cybersecurity Tools & Cyber Attacks — IBM
  • Fundamentals of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • Business Analysis & Process Management
  • In progress: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)
  • In progress: AWS Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)
Languages

Spoken languages

English — full professional Malayalam — native Hindi — limited working

Client-facing throughout: SLA-driven ticketing, RCA documentation, client reporting and shift handover logs are all part of the job.

Full stack

The complete toolbox

Everything I reach for on a regular basis, grouped the way I actually think about it.

Control panels

cPanel / WHM Plesk DirectAdmin CloudLinux & LVE WHMCS Softaculous

OS & web

RHEL CentOS Rocky Linux Ubuntu Debian Apache Nginx LiteSpeed PHP-FPM / CGI LAMP & LEMP tuning

Databases

MySQL MariaDB InnoDB crash & corruption recovery Dump / restore Slow-query tuning Index tuning Replication basics

Security

Malware forensics & remediation Webshell / backdoor removal ModSecurity (OWASP / Comodo) CSF iptables firewalld Fail2Ban Imunify maldet ClamAV KernelCare SSH hardening Security audits

Cloud & migration

AWS EC2 ALB S3 EBS AWS Backup SSM Session Manager IAM DigitalOcean GCP (learning) Cloudflare Laravel Forge cPanel-to-cPanel Cross-provider migrations PHP version upgrades Cutover & rollback planning

Mail & DNS

Exim Postfix Dovecot SMTP / IMAP / POP3 SPF DKIM DMARC Spam filtering RBL delisting A / MX / CNAME / TXT SSL/TLS & AutoSSL acme.sh

Monitoring & tools

Zabbix Grafana Nagios sar pidstat iostat top / atop journalctl Bash scripting Git & Gitolite post-receive deploys rsync screen PM2 Node.js services

Applications

WordPress Joomla! PrestaShop Magento WooCommerce CS-Cart DotNetNuke (DNN)

Support workflow

WHMCS Freshdesk Tawk SLA-driven ticketing RCA documentation Client-facing reporting Shift handover logs
Available

Looking for a server engineer who roots things out properly?

I'm open to conversations about roles in Linux infrastructure, managed hosting and DevOps. Send me the details and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.

Contact me See my work