Atrium Health became my masterclass in full-lifecycle Solutions Engineering. From automating clunky deployments to troubleshooting live disasters, building trust on the ground, and pitching upsells that actually landed—this one had it all. Here’s how it played out.
When I first arrived, deployments were a 4-hour endurance test—manual, fragile, and nerve-wracking. I once made a copy-paste error from our documentation and derailed an entire rollout. Let’s just say I aged a year that day. Determined to never face that pain again, I automated the entire deployment process using Ansible. The infrastructure (EC2, ALB, RDS, S3) was already provisioned by our Infra team, so my focus was on making deployments fast, safe, and repeatable.
I added EC2 and RDS snapshot steps before each deploy and built rollback logic using Ansible’s block/rescue pattern—so if anything failed mid-deploy, the system could automatically revert to the last good state. To ensure we knew immediately if anything went wrong, I integrated CloudWatch alarms + SES email notifications that alerted our team on failure. We cut deployment time to 30 minutes and finally had peace of mind that failures wouldn’t snowball.
Later, I partnered with the DevOps team to integrate everything into GitHub Actions, fully automating the CI/CD pipeline. Now, every code push triggered an automated deploy—with built-in safety nets and instant notifications if anything broke.
“We budgeted half a day for deployments before Chinmaya’s scripts. Afterward? We were done by our second cup of coffee.” — DevOps Team Lead
The badge printer delay was pure chaos. Picture hospital lobbies with lines growing longer by the minute—20 seconds to print a single badge. Chrome DevTools revealed the culprit: multiple redundant API calls bogging everything down. We cleaned that up, and the badge time dropped to 2 seconds flat. Receptionists were cheering (okay, maybe just relieved).
Then there was the mysterious kiosk lag. Every keystroke in the “Recent Visitors” field hit the DB like a hammer. No wonder the system slowed to a crawl. We swapped it for a top-10 dropdown and added debounce logic—boom, problem solved.
ELK dashboards helped us spot check-in peaks (200–250 visitors/hour at large sites). And when 502 errors popped up mysteriously, Dynatrace’s real user monitoring and waterfall charts led us straight to a heavyweight SQL query. We patched it fast and watched error logs go blessedly quiet.
You can’t fix what you don’t understand—so I spent time on the ground with receptionists, security guards, and volunteers. That’s where I heard about real pain points: like needing larger visitor photos for faster ID checks. I made sure those ideas didn’t just sit in a notebook—they went straight into production.
One receptionist put it best:
“Whenever you showed up, we knew our problems were about to get solved.”
And yes, I even joined them for after-shift drinks. I didn’t expect UX insights over nachos, but hey—sometimes bar talk leads to brilliant tweaks.
Security flagged a major gap: banned visitors sneaking through. I pitched and demoed an AI photo-matching POC (inspired by a project I’d done at Delta Airlines). But we didn’t stop there. We also added a feature that monitored badge scans in real-time using AI. If a doctor, nurse, or any hospital staff member’s badge was used at an unexpected location or time, the system automatically triggered an SMS alert to their phone.
The alert included a secure link, allowing staff to instantly report if their badge had been stolen or misplaced—closing the security loop fast. This proactive security layer was a big win with leadership, and Atrium signed a $25K ARR upsell covering both the photo-matching and anomaly-detection system across their major sites. Proof that when you mix tech creativity with trust, good things happen.
Full-lifecycle SE isn’t just about solving problems—it’s about spotting opportunities, deepening partnerships, and making sure both your tech and your client relationships thrive.