Most of my work starts the same way. Something in production is fragile, expensive, or slow to change, and the team is too busy keeping it alive to go fix it properly. That's the part I take off your hands.
Boring is the goal. I take clusters that wake people up and make them predictable: Karpenter handling the autoscaling, RBAC and network policies that actually restrict something, custom operators only where they earn their keep. The test I care about is whether you'd deploy on a Friday.
Manual pipelines fail in ways nobody can reproduce. Declarative state sync fixes that: rebuilding an environment becomes one command instead of an afternoon of archaeology through old Slack threads.
Cloud bills grow quietly because nobody owns them. I read yours line by line — right-sizing resource requests, moving what can tolerate it onto spot, unpicking whatever is charging you a lock-in premium. The first thing you learn is how much of the bill nobody can account for.
Firefighting is a seeing problem. SLIs and SLOs worth paging on, telemetry that answers the question you have while it's still on fire, and security scanning in the deploy path rather than a quarterly report nobody opens.
A fintech SaaS moving millions of transactions was still shipping its monolith through a system nobody trusted. I rebuilt it as a hub-and-spoke ArgoCD setup on AKS — environments properly isolated, Git the only thing allowed to change state.
The question was simple: what happens if an entire region goes away? I built the answer. Terraform and Crossplane provision an identical standby environment, so losing a regional control plane costs you minutes instead of data.
I go through your clusters, pipelines, and cloud bill, then hand back a prioritized list of what's genuinely urgent across security, performance, and cost — not a list of everything that's imperfect.
Ask for an auditOne goal, start to finish. Legacy VMs onto Kubernetes, a GitOps pipeline built around ArgoCD, or an internal platform your product engineers can deploy to without filing a ticket first.
Talk through a projectThe long game. I sit with your engineering team as an embedded extra pair of hands and opinions, steering architecture decisions and chipping away at reliability over months rather than weeks.
Ask about a retainerDescribe the bottleneck. If I'm not the right person for it, I'll say so.