Aafaq Rana
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps and AI Engineer and Developer
Lahore, Pakistan
Toptal member since August 6, 2026
Aafaq is a senior DevOps and AI engineer who specializes in agentic DevOps and large-scale cloud platforms. Over 6 years, he has led legacy modernization programs, built autonomous AI agents for infrastructure operations, and engineered Kubernetes platforms at Netsol Technologies. His expertise spans AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes, where Aafaq cut build-and-ship time by 50% and improved delivery throughput by 30%.
Portfolio
Experience
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 6 years
- Azure DevOps - 6 years
- Kubernetes - 6 years
- DevOps - 6 years
- Docker - 6 years
- Python - 6 years
- Azure - 4 years
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) - 2 years
Preferred Environment
AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Python, TypeScript, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud, CI/CD Pipelines, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Engineering, Cloud Platforms, Deployment, Full-stack Development, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Web Security, AWS DevOps, Linux, Containerization, AWS CloudFormation
The most amazing...
...modernization program I've supervised cut build-and-ship time by 50% and improved delivery throughput by 30% for a major legacy platform.
Work Experience
Senior DevOps Engineer
Netsol
- Managed multiple concurrent DevOps projects and cross-functional engineering teams as part of the platform management group, owning delivery planning, technical direction, stakeholder coordination, and the mentoring of DevOps and SRE engineers.
- Supervised the E2E modernization of legacy products by migrating source control from SVN to Azure DevOps Repos (git-svn) and replatforming CI/CD from legacy Jenkins to standardized Azure DevOps YAML pipelines, cutting build and ship time by 50.
- Applied agentic AI to automatically document legacy and internal codebases and ingest them into a centralized RAG knowledge base on ChromaDB, accelerating onboarding and incident response to reduce MTTR and improve DORA metrics.
- Engineered a Kubernetes AI agent on the Kubernetes MCP Server to autonomously monitor cluster health, detect anomalies, and predict failures before production impact, driving proactive LangGraph-based remediation and reducing unplanned outages.
- Converted traditional observability pipelines into autonomous agentic workflows with LangChain and LangGraph, enabling AI-driven incident triage, automated root-cause analysis, and self-healing across Prometheus, Grafana, and the EFK Stack.
- Designed scalable cloud-native and hybrid infrastructure with Terraform and AWS CDK across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, with secure networking, IAM, encryption, and resilient multi-cloud architectures.
- Built and managed on-premise K3S clusters with Harbor, Longhorn, and custom operators, applying RBAC, ingress, workload isolation, and cluster hardening for reliability and resilience.
- Engineered multi-cloud CI/CD using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and Google Cloud Build with Argo CD across EKS, AKS, GKE, OKE, and K3S, integrating automated testing, Snyk scanning, and Sysdig monitoring aligned with OWASP best practices.
- Embedded IaC validation and policy-as-code (PaC) into CI/CD using Terraform, Checkov, and tfsec to catch misconfigurations, enforce governance, and support compliance via Vanta.
- Built centralized observability with EFK, Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor, and Sysdig for proactive alerting, incident investigation, resilience testing, and chaos engineering.
Senior DevOps & LLM Trainer
Turing
- Evaluated large language models (LLMs) on IaC and DevOps tasks using RLHF, preference ranking, and reward modeling by benchmarking outputs with pass@k, HumanEval, and functional-correctness metrics across Terraform, CDK, and cloud automation.
- Designed adversarial multi-step agentic evaluation scenarios for LLM reasoning on Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud architecture by contributing preference data and rubrics to improve IaC code-generation alignment and safety.
- Built the test automation platform (TAP) with Terraform, CDKTF, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and Pulumi to provision scalable AWS environments for model training and evaluation with IAM, encryption, and network isolation.
- Delivered cloud environments aligned to the AWS Well-Architected Framework by emphasizing reliability, operational excellence, and cost optimization.
- Performed IaC validation and policy enforcement for Terraform- and CDK-based environments by identifying misconfigurations and validating IAM controls to strengthen governance.
Associate Software Engineer
Devsinc
- Deployed Python FastAPI applications to EC2 via Azure DevOps pipelines with secure automated release processes.
- Used Terraform for IaC deployments across AWS and Azure to enable consistent and reliable infrastructure.
- Built a web-based document processing application in Ruby on Rails that improved processing speed by 20%.
- Deployed front- and back-end applications on AWS with high availability and redundancy across multiple environments.
Experience
Personal Portfolio Site Development and Deployment
http://aafaq-rana.spaceEducation
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences - Islamabad, Pakistan
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs
Tools
Terraform, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), GitHub, Observability Tools, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EKS, Postman, Subversion (SVN), Jenkins, Grafana, EFK Stack, Checkov
Languages
Python, TypeScript, SQL, YAML, Bash
Paradigms
Azure DevOps, DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Microservices, Testing, Enterprise Application Architecture
Platforms
Kubernetes, AWS IoT, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure Marketplace, Linux, AWS Lambda, Sysdig, Vanta
Storage
On-premise, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL
Frameworks
AWS Well-Architected Framework, Next.js
Other
Microsoft Azure, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Cloud, Cloud Security, Solution Architecture, CI/CD Pipelines, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Engineering, Cloud Platforms, Deployment, Full-stack Development, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Web Security, AWS DevOps, Containerization, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Inspector, Amazon RDS, Incident Response, GitHub Actions, Artificial Intelligence (AI), GitOps, Security, Large Language Models (LLMs), Model Deployment, Software Architecture, APIs, Automation Testing, Multi-tenant Architecture, Agentic Deployment, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), AI Agent Orchestration, AI Agents, Agentic AI Systems, SOC 2, ChromaDB, MCP Server, Prometheus, K3s, Snyk, OWASP, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Software Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Supabase
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