I design and build scalable, secure & resilient infrastructure while automating processes to ensure platform uptime and stability for high-performing applications.
I have over 8 years of hands-on experience including 3.5 years in leadership role for architecting, developing, automating, and optimizing production-grade deployments on Kubernetes and OpenShift using the best DevOps practices.
Currently, I am working remotely as the Head of Infrastructure at pawaPay, a UK-based fintech leader in Mobile Money payments across Africa. I lead a high-performing team to maintain a really critical platform which handles more than 2 million transactions daily, with hundreds of microservices and connectivity with many telecom providers all across Africa.
Previously, I have led the infrastructure team at Tarabut, a pioneering Open Banking solution provider in the MENA region, I was the first in-house DevOps Engineer and architected the whole DevOps flow, achieving a 99.99% uptime and onboarded 10 banks. I also led the team at Stakater, a Swedish company offering managed Kubernetes/OpenShift and DevOps as a Service solutions. During my tenure, I was responsible for the architecture and significantly grew the team by 300%.
In addition to my full-time roles, I have a passion of teaching and taught an elective DevOps course to graduating students at FAST-NUCES Islamabad, also worked as a trainer at Dice Analytics. I have successfully trained over 800 professionals worldwide on DevOps and Kubernetes, through both corporate and customized bootcamps.
I am also an AWS Community Builder and an active public speaker, having presented at numerous events including DevOpsCon Singapore, Kubernetes Days Pakistan, Data on Kubernetes and given multiple talks on DevOps & hosted more than 10 bootcamps on Kubernetes worldwide. As an active open source contributor, I've developed and led over 10 Kubernetes Controllers/Operators/Apps, with Reloader garnering more than 7,300 stars on Github and many companies using it in their production environments. My Medium blog on Kubernetes has gained significant traction, with over 201K views and 2.6k claps, reflecting my deep passion for and knowledge of the field.
I am CKA, CKAD, AWS Solution Architect Associate, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Associate and Certified in RedHat Delivery Specialist: Openshift Container Platform.
I am skilled in all major of the DevOps tools, including but not limited to Containers, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Openshift, Helm, Jenkins, Github Actions, ArgoCD/Flux, EFK, Prometheus, Grafana, Terraform, Ansible, AWS/Azure/GCP/IBM/Oracle Cloud.
In response to pawaPay's rapid growth, I addressed the company's infrastructure concerns by enhancing the platform's reliability. This involved improving observability across both infrastructure and applications, which we accomplished through the addition of metrics & alerts through Grafana Cloud. I also worked on setting up a performance environment, and gauging performance of the system before doing any architectural upgrade. In addition, I successfully resolved technical debts by migrating manually created resources to Terraform. To enhance quality assurance, I implemented on-demand environments that allowed for the deployment of PRs for testing. I also created a unified helm chart that can be readily templatized for any microservice.
As the first in-house DevOps resource at TG, I effectively transitioned from an outsourced consultant within just one week. Leveraging my expertise, I architected and developed a comprehensive infrastructure & DevOps flow using Terraform, K8s, AWS, Github Actions, etc.
As the sole DevOps resource for nearly 7 months, I oversaw the complete infrastructure, including the integration of 10 banks and the establishment of secure communication with their internal networks through a site-to-site VPN using Fortigate. To ensure smooth operations, I established observability throughout the infrastructure and applications by implementing Prometheus and Grafana for detailed monitoring, statistics, and alerts. Our systems achieved an impressive uptime of 99.999%, facilitated by Uptime Robot for external applications and Uptime Kuma for internal applications. Additionally, I was responsible for interviewing, hiring, and mentoring new team members.
I Lead the team Stakater in Aurora Solutions which provides DevOps as a Service solution to customers. We provided managed Kubernetes & Openshift clusters with different managed tools add-ons. My responsibilities included managing Stakater team, hiring & mentoring new resources. During my time as lead, I grew the team almost 300% and worked on Stakater Platform. I closely worked in defining and implementing the architecture of Stakater.
Conducting Corporate Trainings for DevOps and Teaching 8 weeks(weekends) professional course on DevOps using tools like Git, Github, Docker Containers, Docker Compose, Jenkins, Github Actions, Kubernetes, Helm & Terraform
Taught DevOps to the graduating batch of Bachelors in Computer Science students. The course covered tools like Git, Github, APIs, Docker Containers, Docker Compose, Jenkins, Github Actions, Kubernetes, Helm & Terraform
Worked in Research & Development team called STA (Strategic Technology Advancement). The team works on different projects prioritized and assigned by OCTO (Office of the CTO) for Bentley products. Worked on a major project of converting Monolithic Service to Microservices based architecture and hosting on Azure Cloud
Worked with Code for Pakistan and LMKR in a joint venture. Developed an android app DocLocator through which one can find all the doctors in Islamabad using different search perspectives and fields.
Created a generic helm chart for Kubernetes that can be used to deploy any application as every manifest is templatized in such a way that it can be used with any service.
A personal project containing dockerized samples for different types of applications and the best practices for creating docker images.
Migrated our Production Cluster from IBM Cloud(IKS) to AWS(EKS) with almost zero downtime. Used StakaterPlatform to deploy all stacks, set up replica of all production applications, used sidecar containers for DBs to take backups of data and push to S3, and restored in target cluster
Pliro is an application of Aurora Solutions which provides complete doctor management solution. It was previously deployed using Docker Compose on AWS and was taking a lot of resources so cost was increasing. We architected the complete workflow of moving Pliro to Kubernetes. It consisted of 6 microservices & 2 environments Dev & Prod. We moved it to Kubernetes, deploying with GitOps in Dev environment and CIOps in prod environment. The code was managed in Bitbucket. The services were deployed through Helm using Flux and SealedSecrets were used for k8s secrets
Worked on StakaterPlatform, and divided it into different stacks which are required for deploying your applications for CI/CD in Kubernetes/Openshift. The stacks can be deployed through helm on just a single command. The stacks and their corresponding tools are:
Developed a terraform module to create & manage Openshift 3.11 cluster on Azure. We used already built modules and modified them to fit our needs
Developed a terraform module to host static websites using AWS S3 & Cloudfront, and use cert from AWS ACM through terraform. Can be used for any type of static website
Developed different Kubernetes controllers for our use cases
CGPA: 3.55