Ali Al-Charakh
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Software Developer
Auckland, New Zealand
Toptal member since June 27, 2022
Ali is an experienced principal engineer and cloud architect with 15+ years of experience delivering secure, scalable, high-performance platforms across regulated industries. Proven leader of cross-functional teams, driving enterprise cloud adoption and DevOps automation at scale. Expert in AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and CI/CD, with a strong focus on resilience, compliance, and aligning technology delivery to business outcomes.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 10 years
- AWS Cloud Architecture - 8 years
- Kubernetes - 5 years
- Python 3 - 5 years
- Terraform - 4 years
- GitOps - 4 years
- Go - 4 years
- Networking - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Kubernetes, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Security, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Docker, Microservices, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps)
The most amazing...
...add-ons I've developed were for Kubernetes that made the onboarding of developers a streamlined process.
Work Experience
Principal DevOps Engineer
Westpac New Zealand
- Enabled engineering and development teams by introducing and integrating DevOps best practices and toolsets, reducing overhead in daily development tasks, and reducing features release cycles.
- Designed and built reusable services deployment patterns to help engineering teams use and migrate to the cloud faster, ensuring compliance and security.
- Enabled the faster and wide adoption of containerization and microservices by designing and implementing on-premise multi-tenant containerization platforms using upstream Kubernetes (Kubernetes as a Service model).
- Built and developed Westpac platform engineering chapter practices for cloud adaption and migration.
- Designed and implemented cloud compliance and security using automation (compliance as code).
- Reduced infrastructure complexity by developing and implementing platforms that help teams consume infrastructure as code.
Cloud Architect
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Adopted enterprise cloud computing and advised senior stakeholders on end-to-end AWS cloud migration strategies.
- Used security and compliance frameworks. Architected secure, compliant AWS environments aligned with industry standards.
- Enabled customers to adopt AI/ML solutions at scale.
DevOps and Kubernetes Engineer
Pano AI, Inc
- Migrated the infrastructure build to an IaC pipeline utilizing Terraform and Github Actions.
- Fixed application stability issues related to the GCP Kubernetes build that reduced downtime and made the infrastructure reliable, which allowed developers to consume clusters across multiple environments as a service.
- Built the necessary framework for observability to ensure a one-time incident response, reducing the MTTR and increasing the SLA.
Chapter Lead
Westpac New Zealand
- Built Westpac Cloud team capabilities to enable cloud adoption, improve and advocate for best practices in platform engineering, to enable teams to deliver faster and safer.
- Added cloud infra automation—compliance as code—which enabled Westpac to host 20+ applications, including ML workloads in AWS.
- Built team capacity by mentoring, and educating team members with different levels of skills, allowing Westpac to create grounds for the Platform Engineering chapter.
DevOps Engineer
IBM
- Enabled customers to consume on- and off-premise compute resources based on computing requirements and cost optimization by designing and building hybrid cloud infrastructure utilizing OpenStack, VMware, and Kernel-based virtual machines hypervisors.
- Enabled engineering and development teams by introducing and integrating DevOps best practices. Reduced overhead in daily development tasks reducing feature release cycles.
- Reduced infrastructure complexity by developing and implementing platforms that help teams consume infrastructure as code.
- Introduced software-defined networking and storage by adding flexibility and ease of integration to the infrastructure and providing on-demand API-driven network functions and storage.
- Developed Kubernetes operators and providers that integrate with existing infrastructure creating a less complicated and more efficient deployment.
System Engineer
Spark New Zealand
- Reduced patching time and overhead by automating the applications stack patching.
- Worked on BAU support for Spark clients and Spark’s service delivery platform Linux, VMware, and Citrix support.
- Oversaw the migration of proxies to bluecoats, and automated the log extraction process for compliance and security reporting.
Operations Team Lead
Fanoos Telecom
- Designed and deployed enterprise infrastructure stack including hardware, storage, backup/recovery solutions, and the services software stack.
- Lowered cost and vendor dependency by introducing an enterprise strategy to adopt, utilize, and customize open-source solutions.
- Reduced operational and customization costs by designing and introducing in-house billing and CDR mediation systems that provided flexible business support systems which met the business requirements.
- Decreased compute footprint by 45% through rightsizing and optimizing the deployed applications.
Experience
Cloud Compliance as Code
Kubernetes as a Service
Hybrid Cloud Network Infrastructure
Certifications
AWS Certified Security Speciality
Amazon Web Services
AWS Solutions Architect Associate
Amazon Web Services
JSNAD: OpenJS Node.js Application Developer
Linux Founadation
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
Microsoft
Amazon Web Services SysOps Administrator Associate
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services Developer - Associate
Amazon Web Services
Certified Kubernetes Administrator
Linux Foundation
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
Linux Foundation
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, React
Tools
Terraform, Chef, AWS IAM, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), AWS ELB, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Deployment, Vault, Jenkins, GitHub, Helm, Kubernetes HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA), Amazon EKS
Languages
Python 3, Python, Go, Java
Paradigms
Automation, Agile, DevOps, Microservices, Serverless Architecture, Microservices Architecture
Platforms
Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS ALB, AWS Security Token Service (STS), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Citrix, AWS NLB, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS IoT, Amazon EC2
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Google Cloud
Other
AWS Cloud Architecture, Networking, Cloud, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Immutable Infrastructure, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, GitOps, Amazon RDS, AWS DevOps, Container Orchestration, Consul, CI/CD Pipelines, Team Leadership, Cloud Security, Monitoring, Scripting, Architecture, Web Services, IT Support, Kubernetes Operations (kOps), AWS Transit Gateway, Direct Connect (DC), Palo Alto Networks, IT Operations Management (ITOM), Firewalls, Stackdriver, Prometheus, GitHub Actions, Cloud Infrastructure, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), Platform Engineering, AWS Landing Zone, Customer Engagement
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