Alejandro Llanes, Developer in Rionegro - Antioquia, Colombia
Alejandro is available for hire
Hire Alejandro

Alejandro Llanes

Cloud Architect and Developer

Rionegro - Antioquia, Colombia

Toptal member since June 26, 2026

Expertise
Cloud EngineeringLinuxAWSDevOpsDockerTerraformMySQLPostgreSQLPythonKubernetesGoogle Cloud DevelopmentSystem SecurityGitHubVMware
Bio

Alejandro is a cloud architect and SRE with over 15 years of experience building secure, scalable infrastructure for fintech, government, and media sectors. He specializes in AWS, Kubernetes, and deep Linux administration to design high-availability environments. By combining this foundation with Rust, Python, and generative AI, Alejandro architects resilient, automated workflows that solve complex engineering challenges.

Portfolio

Lulo Bank
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, SonarQube, CircleCI, GitHub...
Alkanza US
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microservices, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)...
Zürich de Occidente
Puppet, vCenter, VMware, Linux, Fortinet, Identity & Access Management (IAM)...

Experience

  • Linux - 20 years
  • PostgreSQL - 15 years
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 12 years
  • CI/CD Pipelines - 11 years
  • Terraform - 10 years
  • Python - 10 years
  • Kubernetes - 9 years
  • Google Cloud - 8 years

Preferred Environment

Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Kubernetes

The most amazing...

...thing I've built is the secure AWS infrastructure that enabled Colombia's first fully digital bank to secure its operational license.

Work Experience

DevOps & Infrastructure Lead

2020 - 2025
Lulo Bank
  • Designed and implemented a DRP architecture that helped the company secure its banking license.
  • Automated infrastructure deployment and promotion using Jenkins and Terraform.
  • Assessed the cloud architecture using the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
  • Validated security and compliance with Dome9 and Qualys.
  • Analyzed code using SonarQube, Veracode, and Snyk.
  • Designed the cloud infrastructure for AWS services, including ECS, EKS, Fargate, Batch, EC2, Lambdas, Kinesis, API Gateway, SES, SNS, and S3.
  • Designed a multi-region replication schema with DynamoDB, MySQL Aurora, and S3.
  • Designed a multi-region replication schema for EC2 instances using AWS CloudEndure.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, SonarQube, CircleCI, GitHub, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), OWASP, DevOps, CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Identity & Access Management (IAM), Docker, Cloud, Python

Head of DevOps

2016 - 2019
Alkanza US
  • Designed and implemented the architecture for migrating Docker Swarm services to a microservices platform on top of Kubernetes.
  • Implemented the infrastructure for data pipelines using Apache Airflow, EMR, and Redshift.
  • Implemented CI/CD pipelines from scratch, replacing the old manual makefiles stack.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microservices, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), AWS Glue, EMR, Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon RDS, DocumentDB, Yarn Workspaces, Istio, Calico, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, etcd, RabbitMQ, Redis, Spark, Apache ZooKeeper, Docker, Rkt, LXC, Git, Subversion (SVN), Apache2, NGINX, HAProxy, Traefik, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, ELK stack, Kubernetes, DevOps, CI/CD Pipelines, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Identity & Access Management (IAM), Cloud, Python

IT Administrator

2014 - 2016
Zürich de Occidente
  • Automated administrative tasks with Puppet and implemented and administered vCenter. Designed and implemented the backup and disaster recovery plans for ESXi virtual machines.
  • Automated the deployment to GlassFish application server clusters using Jenkins.
  • Configured datacenter virtual networks for VMware clusters on top of HP blade servers and 3PAR storage.
Technologies: Puppet, vCenter, VMware, Linux, Fortinet, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Python

Experience

Production-grade Multi-region Kubernetes Architecture & AI-driven Operational Workflows

Designed, built, and automated a highly secure, scalable, and compliant cloud infrastructure to support a high-volume digital banking platform. The primary goal was to establish an enterprise-grade ecosystem that met stringent regulatory compliance standards while maintaining high availability and accelerating developer velocity.

The core architecture relied on AWS and GCP environments. I spearheaded the migration from legacy infrastructure to production-ready Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) clusters. To ensure maximum resilience and zero data loss, I designed a multi-region replication strategy utilizing Amazon Aurora and DynamoDB Global Tables, coupled with automated cross-region S3 replication.

To modernize operations, I integrated generative AI solutions (including OpenAI, Hugging Face, and DeepSeek) into automated workflows via FastAPI and Docker. These agents automated complex tasks like automated database analysis and live operational monitoring. The entire ecosystem was managed strictly via Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and deployed through GitOps pipelines utilizing Jenkins and GitHub Actions

Education

2003 - 2007

Engineer's Degree in Computer Systems and Networks

University of the Llanos - Villavicencio, Colombia

Certifications

OCTOBER 2025 - OCTOBER 2027

Certified Kubernetes Application Developer

The Linux Foundation

SEPTEMBER 2025 - SEPTEMBER 2027

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003)

HashiCorp

SEPTEMBER 2025 - SEPTEMBER 2027

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

The Linux Foundation

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Node.js

Tools

Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, GitHub, VMware, Jenkins, Helm

Paradigms

DevOps

Platforms

Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes

Languages

Python, Java, Go

Storage

Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, MySQL

Other

CI/CD Pipelines, Cloud, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), GitHub Actions, Identity & Access Management (IAM), TCP/IP, Firewalls, System Programming, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), OWASP, Fortinet

Collaboration That Works

How to Work with Toptal

Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.

1

Share your needs

Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2

Choose your talent

Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3

Start your risk-free talent trial

Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.

Top talent is in high demand.

Start hiring