Alejandro Rivera Gonzalez
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Developer
Guadalajara, Mexico
Toptal member since August 23, 2017
Alejandro is a DevSecOp/MLOps/ SRE/platform engineer expert in cloud technologies with experience in AWS, Azure, and GCP on large production environments. He can automate anything from code deployment to infrastructure, ensuring best practices and proper monitoring. Alejandro excels in Agile environments, where he can effectively apply his problem-solving skills.
Portfolio
Experience
- DevOps - 10 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 10 years
- Python - 8 years
- Docker - 8 years
- Terraform - 8 years
- Kubernetes - 7 years
- Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) - 3 years
- Continuous Integration (CI) - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Python 3, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, GitOps, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), Agile Software Development, Kubernetes, Argo CD, Google Cloud
The most amazing...
...project I've completed was setting up multi-region Kubernetes clusters with infrastructure as code and a Terraform and GitOps methodology.
Work Experience
SRE/Grafana Observability Specialist
Koch Industries - Koch CC
- Set up infrastructure from the ground up using Terraform and multiple AWS accounts for isolation, deploying EKS clusters for our observability stack.
- Set up Grafana LGTM stack for multiple clusters, optimizing usage, rightsizing deployments, and fine-tuning configurations. Alloy collectors/gateways are set up for data ingestion.
- Reduced costs of network transfers by leveraging PL, S3 endpoints, and configuring availability zone preference on Kubernetes to heavily prefer an AZ for applications where their components talk to each other, avoiding data transfer costs between AZs.
- Automated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions for cluster and application deployment, connecting every cluster to Rancher on deployment, and Rancher adding it to ArgoCD for application control.
DevSecOps Engineer
RenoQuest, LLC
- Helped as a solutions architect designing the company's infrastructure.
- Provided budget estimates for implementation in various cloud providers.
- Gave advice on the best technologies to use for a couple of custom systems that were being designed.
Enterprise DevOps | MLOps Consultant
Deckers - IT
- Designed a CI/CD plan to modernize application development in the company and select the best-suited tools for the job.
- Developed CI/CD pipelines and templates from the ground up for Java applications using GitHub Actions.
- Created a migration plan to transition from SVN to GitHub and GitHub Actions workflows for a better team collaboration and development process.
- Set up and configured a database migration tool, Liquidbase, in GitHub workflows for their Oracle DBs.
- Built Pipelines for Generative & Inference AI using AWS Sagemaker.
Senior DevOps Engineer
Imbellus
- Supported infrastructure migration from ECS to Kubernetes and reduced infrastructure footprint.
- Worked on the observability pipeline from Fluentd in containers to the ES cluster and search through Kibana. Metrics from containers to Prometheus with alerts from the alert manager integrated into Slack and visualization in Grafana.
- Moved away CD with ArgoCD from imperative deployments to declarative, following GitOps practices.
DevOps Engineer
Local Catch LLC
- Migrated the current infrastructure into IaC using Terraform and Ansible.
- Wrote lambdas in Python to help automate custom processes.
- Set up monitoring.
- Fixed issues related to their Docker containers and ECS cluster.
- Set up a development/CI environment.
DevOps
Takt
- Set up Terraform modules for infra deployment.
- Set up and maintained Kubernetes clusters for container orchestration.
- Created Kafka PoC.
- Created Ansible AWX PoC.
- Created Docker images.
DevOps Engineer
EpicGames
- Collaborated with the operations team to handle all infrastructure.
- Deployed new infrastructure using Terraform to Azure cloud and AWS.
- Wrote Ansible playbooks to automate the configuration of new resources.
- Migrated existing applications and services into Docker containers.
- Created new MongoDB replica sets and implemented Fluentd for log processing.
- Worked on implementing Kubernetes in a new infrastructure iteration.
DevOps Engineer
Disney ABC
- Managed and maintained more than 25,000 chef recipes.
- Collaborated with colleagues to prepare the infrastructure for Oscar's event and the NBA Finals, pre-warming load balancers and increasing the capacity of back-end servers.
- Deployed preproduction and production environments, rotating AZs in and out to avoid downtime.
- Down-sized infrastructure after big events like the Oscars and NBA Finals.
- Wired Python scripts to automate AWS reports using the BOTO3 library.
- Contributed to the reduction of infrastructure footprint that resulted in more than 30% monthly cost decrease by right-sizing everything and identifying unused resources.
DevOps Engineer
Electronic Arts
- Contributed to the operations team to keep eCommerce infrastructure healthy and running.
- Deployed voice servers across multiple regions.
- Deployed apps in preproduction and production environments.
- Troubleshot live issues.
- Created monitoring dashboards in Zabbix.
- Implemented Auto Scaling groups for different services and applications.
Quality Assurance and Production Management
Morgan Stanley
- Prepared all systems for business in different markets around the world (Asia, EU).
- Handled incidents on sales and trade platform.
- Set up Apache/Tomcat environments for development teams.
- Managed NAS/NFS shares.
Lead NOC Engineer
Gorilla Nation/Evolve Media Corp
- Supervised and coached people on my team.
- Monitored all infrastructure on a 24x7 schedule, including metal and virtual servers.
- Wrote Puppet manifests to automate server configuration.
- Improved internal process for better team 24x7 rotation.
- Provided performance improvements for Apache back ends.
NOC Engineer
Gorilla Nation/Evolve Media Corp
- Contributed proactively to internal projects to improve monitoring and production tools.
- Monitored infrastructure.
- Developed a visual check script to rotate through all of our sites to keep it running inside our office and help visual monitoring of sites.
- Served as the first point of contact when there was an outage, troubleshooting, and escalating when necessary.
- Improved our response to volumes filling up by creating a wrapper script for LVM.
Experience
Multi-availability Zone Deployment on AWS
https://github.com/riveragalejandro/ha-deploy-terraform-ansibleEducation
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Systems Engineering
Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) - Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico
Skills
Libraries/APIs
OpenSSL, REST APIs, OpenAPI, Azure API Management, Amazon EC2 API, Back-end APIs, Apigee, Terragrunt, Argon.js, ArcGIS
Tools
AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS ELB, Ansible, Grafana, Terraform, Boto 3, Git, Fluentd, Helm, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon EKS, AWS CloudFormation, VPN, Amazon CloudWatch, GitHub, AWS Glue, AWS CodeBuild, AWS IAM, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Web Application Firewall, Azure Key Vault, GCP Security, Logging, ELK (Elastic Stack), Observability Tools, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Kubernetes Operators, Azure ML Studio, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon ElastiCache, GitLab CI/CD, TeamCity, Jenkins, Zabbix, Chef, Kibana, Sentry, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon SageMaker, Microsoft Copilot, AWS Step Functions, AWS Fargate, Nagios, Apache, Pingdom, Logstash, Sumo Logic, Puppet, Jira, AppDynamics, NGINX, Varnish, Perforce, Apache Tomcat, CircleCI, Apache Airflow, Splunk, Loki
Languages
Python 3, SQL, Bash, Python, Bash Script, Snowflake, PHP, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Go
Frameworks
AWS HA, Windows PowerShell, Ruby on Rails (RoR)
Paradigms
DevOps, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Development (CD), Agile Software Development, Continuous Delivery (CD), Microservices, Azure DevOps, Microservices Architecture, DevSecOps, Automation, Load Testing, API/Services Architecture, Event-driven Architecture, Continuous Integration (CI), Serverless Architecture
Platforms
AWS Lambda, AWS ALB, Amazon EC2, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Docker, CentOS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure Functions, AWS Cloud Computing Services, Blockchain, Cloud Run, AWS Security Token Service (STS), Apache Kafka, Kubeflow, DigitalOcean, KVM, Apache2, Amazon, Rancher
Storage
Datadog, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Auto-scaling Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon DynamoDB, Databases, Azure Cloud Services, NoSQL, NetApp, MongoDB, Redis, Redshift, Google Cloud
Industry Expertise
Cybersecurity
Other
Linux Server Administration, GitOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), ServiceNow, Networks, Prometheus, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon RDS, Security, Containerization, Load Balancers, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud, AWS DevOps, Argo CD, Cloud Migration, Containers, GPU Computing, DevOps Engineer, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), AWS Cloud Architecture, Cloud Architecture, Single Sign-on (SSO), IT Security, Network Security, Infrastructure, Networking, AWS VPN, System Administration, GitHub Actions, Cloud Infrastructure, Monitoring, Shell Scripting, AWS CodePipeline, Serverless, Configuration Management, Cloud Security, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Identity & Access Management (IAM), Cloudflare, Release Management, APIs, Cloud Engineering, Costs, Distributed Systems, OpenTelemetry, Scalable Web Services, Architecture, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Integration, Cloud Monitoring, Canary Deployment, SSL Certificates, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Solution Architecture, API Gateways, Decentralized Systems, Computer Networking, Cloud Computing, Kubernetes Operations (kOps), Server Infrastructure, Kubernetes Security, Scalable Architecture, Microsoft Azure, API Management, Cloud Cost Management, RESTFul APIs, High-availability Linux, Reliability Engineering, AWS Secrets Manager, Backup & Recovery, DNS, Azure Cloud Security, Karpenter, Self-managed Kubernetes, Data Engineering, Amazon Redshift, Agile DevOps, Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP), Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Debugging Tools, Middleware, AWS X-Ray, Event-driven Systems, AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Cloud Security, Large Language Models (LLMs), DataOps, GCP DevOps, Linux Administration, Virtualization, Apigee Hybrid, Proxies, Performance, Server Optimization, AWS ECS Fargate, Observability, Snyk, Trivy, Incident Response, Grafana 2, Amazon API Gateway, DApps, Web3, Pulumi, FastAPI, Machine Learning, SOC 2, OpenID Connect (OIDC), Agentic Deployment, AI Agents, Agentic AI Systems, xCAT, Graphite, ECS, Drones, SecOps, API Integration, Analytics, IT Systems Engineering, Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Back-end, ML Pipelines, MLflow, mimir, Tempo
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