Daniil Z.

DevOps Engineer | Cloud Architect | AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform

Top Rated Plus DevOps engineer and cloud architect with 20 years of hands-on experience — 100% Job Success, 5,600+ hours billed on Upwork. I design, automate, and run production infrastructure that companies bet their business on: Kubernetes platforms, CI/CD pipelines, cloud cost programs, and monitoring that catches problems before your customers do. Recent results for clients: • Cut a client's GCP bill by roughly a quarter (~€3,400/month) through workload right-sizing, storage lifecycle policies, and egress optimization — found and documented every saving before touching anything. • Planned and executed a production migration of a real-time communications platform to Hetzner: staged cutover, full rollback path, monitoring parity verified before and after the switch. • Lead DevOps for a video distribution platform: GitLab CI pipelines, Rancher-managed Kubernetes clusters, HashiCorp Vault for secrets, all infrastructure as code with OpenTofu. • Helped a SaaS client reach SOC 2 compliance (Drata): infrastructure hardening, access reviews, evidence automation. • Built observability stacks from scratch — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, alerting wired to Slack/PagerDuty — so incidents get caught in minutes, not from customer emails. AI & automation: I build LLM-assisted operations — agentic workflows for infrastructure tasks, self-hosted model serving, and durable automation pipelines on Temporal. If you want AI in your ops without handing your data to third parties, I've done it in production. Beyond infrastructure: I also take on backend development (Python/FastAPI, Node.js/TypeScript, Flutter) and data analytics work (SQL on PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, Grafana dashboards, cost analysis) — same production discipline. Core stack: • Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, DigitalOcean • Containers & orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, K3s, RKE2/Rancher), Docker, Helm • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform / OpenTofu, Pulumi, Ansible, CloudFormation • CI/CD: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines • Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry, ELK • Secrets & security: HashiCorp Vault, SOPS/age, IAM, VPC design, Tailscale, SOC 2 • Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, ClickHouse • Scripting: Bash, Python, Node.js/TypeScript Based in Barcelona (CET) — comfortable overlap with both EU and US East Coast hours. Fluent English and Spanish, native Russian. If your deploys are slow, your cloud bill keeps growing, or you're one incident away from realizing you have no monitoring — let's talk.