// Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Denis Smirnov

Senior DevOps / Platform Ops / SRE Engineer with 20+ years building and scaling internal developer platforms, Kubernetes infrastructure, multi-region high-availability (HA) systems, blockchain RPC networks, and bare-metal fleets. Specializing in Platform Engineering, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, observability, on-call rotation and incident management for high-load systems.

20+
Years Experience
4x
Team Lead
100+
Blockchain Networks
Get in Touch View Experience
denis@devops ~ zsh
$ kubectl get pods -A | wc -l
1337
$ terraform plan
Plan: 42 to add, 0 to change
$ helm list --all-namespaces
28 releases deployed
$ uptime
20 years in infrastructure
$

What I Work With

Technical Skills

Container Orchestration

Kubernetes Helm Docker OpenShift Docker Swarm Istio K8s Operators

Cloud Platforms

AWS EKS EC2 S3 RDS Yandex Cloud GCP Selectel DigitalOcean Hetzner

IaC & CI/CD

Terraform Ansible GitHub Actions GitLab CI Vault ArgoCD

Monitoring & Observability

Prometheus Grafana ELK Stack Loki PagerDuty OpsGenie Custom Exporters

Blockchain Infrastructure

Ethereum Arbitrum Optimism Polygon Avalanche Solana BSC

Databases & Services

PostgreSQL Elasticsearch ClickHouse Redis Cloudflare Airflow

Practices & Methodologies

Platform Engineering / Platform Ops Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Internal Developer Platform (IDP) GitOps Infrastructure as Code (IaC) CI/CD pipelines High Availability (HA) Disaster Recovery (DR) Multi-region Service Mesh Blue-Green / Canary deployments On-call rotation Incident management Cost optimization / FinOps DevSecOps

20+ years · fintech, crypto, high-load, enterprise

What I’ve Done

Kubernetes & Platform Engineering

  • Ran 7–12+ production Kubernetes clusters across 4 regions with GitOps (ArgoCD, Helm, Kustomize) and full Infrastructure as Code
  • Built bare-metal Kubernetes with Cilium (eBPF) and MetalLB; wrote a custom Kubernetes operator managing node lifecycle for 100+ blockchain networks
  • Moved production to a new Kubernetes cluster with a zero-downtime DNS cutover and decommissioned the legacy one in 3 weeks
  • Migrated a large retail platform between cloud providers (Selectel → Yandex Cloud) in 2 months without downtime
Kubernetes ArgoCD Helm Terraform Cilium Go

SRE & Incident Management

  • Built on-call rotation, SRE practices and postmortem culture from scratch for a product with 5M+ users
  • Every alert ships with a runbook: ~90 alert rules, 70+ runbooks; alerting grown from 91 to 254 rules on another platform
  • Led response to security incidents end to end: timeline, containment, postmortems, incident runbooks
  • Monitored 200+ public RPC endpoints; found a capacity bug that silently removed 58% of nodes from DNS at peak
Prometheus VictoriaMetrics Grafana Loki Alertmanager PagerDuty

Cloud Security & DevSecOps

  • Took a fintech platform (stablecoin Visa cards) to a full security baseline in about a month as its sole platform engineer, including a zero-downtime move of production to a new hardened cluster
  • Built an AWS security baseline from scratch: CloudTrail with tamper alarm, GuardDuty, AWS Config with CIS conformance, KMS, ABAC, GitHub OIDC instead of static keys
  • Supply chain: Cosign image signing, SBOM in CI, Kyverno verify-images enforcement, Trivy, Falco, Tetragon
  • Zero Trust access for admin surfaces, WAF on the perimeter, secrets via HashiCorp Vault and External Secrets
  • Hands-on PCI DSS / SOC 2 audit experience: control evidence and remediation
AWS Cloudflare Kyverno Cosign Vault WAF

Bare Metal, Storage & Data

  • Automated bare-metal provisioning with MAAS, LUKS encryption and RAID; virtualization on Proxmox, KVM/libvirt, LXD, VMware
  • Distributed storage on Ceph; S3-compatible object storage on MinIO
  • PostgreSQL in production: replication, PITR, Patroni, CloudNativePG, pgBackRest / WAL-G; ClickHouse, Redis, MongoDB
  • Backups and DR with Velero and Restic, DR site in a second provider, regular restore drills
MAAS Ceph Proxmox PostgreSQL Patroni ClickHouse

Blockchain & High-Load Infrastructure

  • Built a public RPC service for 50+ blockchain networks across Frankfurt, New York, Tokyo and Amsterdam
  • Operated nodes, indexers and validators for 100+ networks (Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, TON, Tron and more); automated updates of 30+ daemons
  • Designed a Stratum v2 relay in Go holding 10K+ concurrent miner connections
  • Kept a 1M+ user high-load trading site and an online game backend running
Ethereum Cosmos Solana Go Nomad Consul

Networking, VPN & Anti-Censorship

  • Operated a production VPN data plane across many hosting providers: Xray (VLESS / REALITY / XHTTP), WireGuard relay tier, policy-based routing, nftables
  • Automated IP rotation and end-to-end probing of VPN nodes in Go
  • Author of tiredvpn, an open-source DPI-resistant VPN with 20+ bypass strategies against TSPU and GFW
  • RIPE NCC certified (LIR, IPv6); deep Linux network stack tuning and packet-level diagnostics
Xray WireGuard nftables BGP TLS Go

Leadership

  • Led DevOps teams four times: work distribution, infrastructure code review, mentoring, hiring
  • Co-authored a Linux course with Yandex, top-10 in Yandex.Root, moderator of linux.org.ru
  • Explain infrastructure and security risk in business terms to founders and non-engineers
Team Lead Mentoring Hiring

Recognition

Achievements

Yandex.Root Top 10

Competed in team Yandex.Root challenges, achieving top-10 placement in all stages with all tasks completed

Linux Course Instructor

Co-authored and taught Linux administration courses together with Yandex team

linux.org.ru Moderator

Former moderator of the largest Russian-speaking Linux community

RIPE NCC Certified

LIR Course and IPv6 Course certifications from RIPE Network Coordination Centre

Claude Whisperer

Successfully made AI assistants drop F-bombs in conversations

What Colleagues Say

Testimonials

Once Denis and I were counting file descriptors for TCP sockets opened through an ingress controller outside the k8s cluster. If I ever need someone to go on a recon mission, I'd definitely recommend him.

Stanislav Cherenkov

Stanislav Cherenkov

CTO

Working with Denis means duct tape and bash scripts can solve anything. That's our philosophy.

Alexander Ilyin

Alexander Ilin

Senior DevOps Engineer

When Denis talked about DevOps stuff, I just nodded along understanding nothing. But I tried to look smart so he'd think I'm a competent manager. Not sure if it worked though.

Anastasia Polyakova

Anastasia Polyakova

Project Manager

Open Source

Projects

10

chainplane

Kubernetes operator for 102 blockchain networks. Declarative node lifecycle, auto-upgrades, health monitoring, and snapshot bootstrap via a single CRD.

Go Kubernetes Operator Helm
9

push-from-k8s-back-to-docker-registry

Utility to push images from Kubernetes cluster back to Docker registry. Useful for air-gapped environments and image migration.

Go Kubernetes Docker
2

k8s-internal-loadbalancer

Kubernetes-native TCP load balancer with automatic pod discovery. Uses Traefik + sidecar pattern with least-connections algorithm and Helm support.

Go Kubernetes Traefik
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Let's Connect

Get in Touch

Ready to build something great?

Available for Senior DevOps positions, consulting, and infrastructure projects.

taz.inside@gmail.com Preferred contact method
@tazhate Telegram
Denis Smirnov

Denis Smirnov

Senior DevOps Engineer

Moscow, Russia