Hanad Ahmed
Senior Platform & DevOps Engineer based in London, with 8+ years designing, automating and operating AWS cloud-native platforms. Currently responsible for a four-cluster Amazon EKS environment serving 250+ microservices and 150+ engineers.
About Me
I currently own a four-cluster Amazon EKS platform spanning production, UAT, QA and development, supporting 250+ microservices and 150+ developers while sustaining 99.5% availability against defined SLOs. I've cut AWS infrastructure spend by 30–70% across successive optimisation efforts and turned multi-hour deployments into ones that take seconds.
Strong advocate of operational excellence: robust logging, monitoring and alerting, well-tested disaster recovery and high-availability design. I've interviewed, hired and mentored DevOps engineers, and helped drive PCI DSS compliance for payment services.
CKA, CKAD and AWS certified.
Professional Experience
- Built an AI DevOps first responder (AWS DevOps Agent, Lambda, SQS, WAF) that investigates Teams requests and Jira tickets read-only across AWS, EKS, CI/CD and Datadog, returning a root cause, evidence and a fix in minutes.
- Introduced Amazon EKS and led migration from a monolith to 250+ microservices across a four-cluster platform (prod, UAT, QA, dev) used by 150+ developers.
- Cut AWS costs by 70% via PerfectScale-driven right-sizing, Karpenter NodePool tuning, RDS/SQL Server optimisation, ECR lifecycle policies and VPC endpoints.
- Reduced deployment times from hours to seconds with GitOps delivery via Argo CD and CI/CD across TeamCity and GitHub Actions.
- Defined and enforced SLOs, sustaining 99.5% production availability over the past 12 months, tracked via Datadog.
- Designed the platform's HA/DR strategy: multi-AZ by default, RTO under 4 hours, RPO of 1 hour, validated via twice-yearly DR exercises, chaos engineering (Gremlin, AWS FIS) and load testing.
- Built automated ephemeral PR environments (GitHub Actions, Docker, Argo CD ApplicationSets) provisioned in 7 minutes and auto-torn-down.
- Standardised on-premises server configuration with Ansible, so every machine is built identically and none are configured by hand.
- Helped drive PCI DSS compliance and own recurring audit, logging and monitoring reviews with the CISO.
- Interviewed, hired and mentored five DevOps engineers.
- Architected secure cross-account continuous delivery pipelines in AWS, improving deployment governance and release speed.
- Provisioned secure, highly available AWS infrastructure with CloudFormation aligned to the Well-Architected Framework.
- Built production observability with Datadog, cutting MTTR by 40% through improved detection and diagnosis.
- Participated in on-call rotations, incident management and RCA for business-critical applications.
- Delivered AWS cost optimisation initiatives, reducing infrastructure spend by 30% in each of three consecutive years.
- Promoted DevOps practices across development teams through training, mentorship and hands-on support.
- Applied least-privilege access control, strengthening operational security posture.
- Introduced Snyk for dependency and vulnerability scanning, reducing package vulnerabilities.
- Completed intensive engineering consultancy training covering JavaScript development, Linux, cloud infrastructure and CI/CD fundamentals.
Technical Skills
Cloud (AWS)
Kubernetes & containers
Infrastructure as Code
CI/CD & GitOps
Observability & reliability
Security & compliance
Cost optimisation (FinOps)
Scripting & AI
Education
BSc Computer Science: Software Engineering
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield