Fahad R.

LAST UPDATED: 01 Oct 2026 I build the pipelines, cloud infrastructure and compliance evidence that startups and fintechs need — and I make them run without anyone awake at 2 am. 15 years in infrastructure and security: I started running Linux servers for gaming communities in 2011, at 11. Today I'm Principal DevOps Engineer and Chief Security Officer at a US fintech and Principal DevOps Engineer at a Canadian edtech, and I look after more than 40 apps and servers. Before that I was CTO and engineering lead of an 18-person team at an Australian property-tech startup. What I do: DevOps & cloud infrastructure — CI/CD on GitHub Actions and GitLab, blue/green deployments with zero downtime, cloud-to-cloud migrations, Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform on GCP, AWS and DigitalOcean. Recent work: about a dozen legacy sites moved from LAMP 5 to LAMP 8, and a production estate moved from GCP to DigitalOcean. Security & compliance engineering — SOC 2, GLBA and GDPR control and evidence systems, zero-trust network segmentation, IAM audits, centralised audit logging, and redaction that keeps personal and financial data out of your logs. At the fintech I designed and built the compliance evidence system from nothing, as its Principal infrastructure and security engineer. Observability & reliability — Loki and ELK pipelines into immutable storage, Prometheus and Grafana dashboards provisioned as code, health probes, retention and disaster-recovery drills. One example: an Elasticsearch cluster stuck at its shard ceiling, brought from 810 shards to 433 with lifecycle errors at zero. Fractional CTO — architecture, hiring, roadmap and delivery for a startup that needs technical leadership before it can afford a full-time CTO. How I work: - Proof over claims. My portfolio shows the real systems, with secrets and internal names redacted. - Document reality. If a control isn't in place, the documentation says so — before an auditor finds it. - Every change is reversible, tested and written down. I reply within an hour between 6 am and midnight Pakistan time (UTC+5); overnight messages are answered from 6 am. I also work under the name Streetlight DevSecOps Division.