Ali Bashir, Developer in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Ali is available for hire
Hire Ali

Ali Bashir

Bio

Ali designs and operates secure, large-scale cloud platforms across AWS, Azure, and GCP. An AWS Community Builder in the Security category, he architects multi-region Kubernetes environments, automates infrastructure with Terraform, and embeds security controls directly into CI/CD pipelines. He delivers production-grade platforms engineered for reliability, compliance, and scale.

Portfolio

QueCloudSolutions
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins...
Nxtone
AWS IoT, Terraform, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Datadog, Amazon EKS...
Blue East
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Ansible, Docker, GitLab, Azure DevOps...

Experience

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
  • Terraform - 5 years
  • Kubernetes - 5 years
  • CI/CD Pipelines - 5 years
  • Azure DevOps - 5 years
  • DevSecOps - 5 years
  • Cloud Security - 5 years
  • Docker - 5 years

Preferred Environment

Linux, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Argo CD, GitLab CI/CD, Prometheus, Python, Ansible, Amazon EKS

The most amazing...

...engagement replaced 14 manually managed AWS accounts with a fully automated, policy-enforced multi-account platform using Terraform and AWS Organizations.

Work Experience

Senior DevSecOps Engineer

2022 - PRESENT
QueCloudSolutions
  • Architected a 14-account AWS platform using modular Terraform and AWS Organizations, enforcing SCPs and guardrails that reduced environment provisioning from days to under 30 minutes.
  • Led GitOps adoption with Argo CD across production Kubernetes clusters, achieving zero-downtime deployments and full audit traceability for all configuration changes across environments.
  • Built automated security remediation pipelines using AWS Config, EventBridge, and Lambda, reducing mean time to compliance violation resolution from hours to under five minutes across all accounts.
  • Designed DevSecOps pipelines across GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins with integrated SAST, DAST, container image scanning, and secrets detection, enforcing security gates before every production release.
  • Deployed end-to-end observability stacks using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry across multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, cutting mean time to detection for production incidents by over 60%.
  • Designed GPU-enabled EKS node groups with NVIDIA drivers, autoscaling policies, and isolated namespaces to support machine learning training and AI inference workloads for enterprise clients.
  • Hardened EKS cluster security with IRSA for workload identity, OPA/Gatekeeper admission policies, Kubernetes Network Policies for east-west traffic control, and image signing enforcement via ArgoCD.
  • Enforced AWS Organizations guardrails with SCPs blocking privilege escalation paths, CloudTrail disablement, and public S3 exposure across all accounts, reducing policy violation incidents to zero.
  • Implemented IAM Identity Center with ABAC across a multi-account AWS environment, eliminating shared credentials and enforcing environment-scoped least-privilege permission sets per team and role.
  • Established SOC 2 Type II cloud infrastructure readiness by mapping Security Hub findings and AWS Config conformance packs to Trust Services Criteria, remediating control gaps ahead of external audit.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Argo CD, DevSecOps, DevOps, Amazon CloudFront, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), SSL Configurations, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Amazon EC2, AWS DevOps, Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon RDS, Azure, GitHub Actions, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Azure Virtual Network (VNet), GPU Computing, Snowflake, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Containers, NAT, NVIDIA CUDA, Datadog, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Identity & Access Management (IAM), Microsoft Entra, IT Security, GitHub, AWS Lambda, Azure Active Directory, Data Engineering, Infrastructure, OpenAI, Deployment, Automation Engineering, Playwright, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloudflare, MongoDB, NGINX, Ruby on Rails 8, AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Fargate, AWS SDK, Cloud Infrastructure, ECS, Event-driven Architecture, Microservices Architecture, Distributed Systems, Large Language Models (LLMs), FastAPI, LangChain, LangSmith, AWS Deployment, Automation, Grafana, AWS Config, Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, ClickHouse, Loki, SOC 2, AWS ALB, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, Observability, Telemetry, Railway, Containerization, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Linux, Networking, Cloud, Go, Rust, Virtualization, AWS X-Ray, AWS Step Functions, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), WP Engine, Keycloak, C#, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Agile DevOps, AWS CloudFormation, Migration, Windows, Legacy Software, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), GCP DevOps, PostgreSQL, Helm, Bash, HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp, Observability Tools, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Microsoft Azure, Git, Azure Cloud Security, Network Architecture, VPN tunnels, Site-to-site VPN, VPN, Cloud Architecture, Slack, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Lambda Functions, Microsoft Azure Portal, GitLab, GitOps, Security Compliance, Cybersecurity Operations, Azure DevOps Services, Ubuntu, Cloud Security, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Cloud Security, Visual Studio, Solution Architecture, Domain DNS Setup, Domain Migration, IT Infrastructure, Web Hosting, Zero Trust, Continuous Integration (CI), Agentic AI Systems, Agentic AI, SOC Compliance, Okta, Jira

Senior DevSecOps | Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

2025 - 2026
Nxtone
  • Architected AWS Organizations' security posture with SCPs restricting high-risk actions at the OU level, reducing blast radius from misconfigured or compromised accounts across a multi-account environment.
  • Deployed IAM Identity Center with ABAC, replacing long-lived IAM user credentials across engineering teams and establishing least-privilege permission sets aligned to job functions and environments.
  • Designed multi-VPC network security with Transit Gateway routing, enforced security group hygiene, and eliminated over-permissive 0.0.0.0/0 ingress rules, segmenting workload and data tiers across accounts.
  • Secured EKS workloads by implementing IRSA for pod-level AWS access, enforcing Kubernetes Network Policies to restrict east-west traffic, and deploying OPA/Gatekeeper to block privileged containers.
  • Codified legacy AWS infrastructure into modular, security-reviewed Terraform, eliminating configuration drift and enabling auditable provisioning with pre-merge Checkov and tfsec scanning in GitHub Actions CI pipelines.
  • Built centralized security monitoring by integrating GuardDuty, Security Hub, and AWS Config across all accounts into a delegated administrator account, routing high-severity alerts to PagerDuty with a sub-5-minute SLA.
  • Implemented WAF rule sets on CloudFront distributions with rate-limiting, geo-restriction, and OWASP-managed rule groups, reducing malicious traffic reaching the origin by over 80%.
  • Led SOC 2 Type II cloud infrastructure readiness, mapping AWS Config rules and Security Hub controls to CC6-CC8 control families and remediating 30+ failing controls to achieve an audit-ready posture.
  • Hardened encryption posture across Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache, Amazon S3, and EBS by enforcing encryption-at-rest and in-transit via AWS Config conformance packs and Terraform policy enforcement, reaching zero unencrypted resources in production.
  • Integrated ArgoCD GitOps workflows with image signing verification and restricted ArgoCD RBAC with IRSA, ensuring only cryptographically verified artifacts were deployed to production EKS clusters.
Technologies: AWS IoT, Terraform, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Datadog, Amazon EKS, AWS IAM, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, Visual Studio, Solution Architecture, Domain DNS Setup, Domain Migration, IT Infrastructure, Web Hosting, Zero Trust, Continuous Integration (CI), Agentic AI Systems, Agentic AI, SOC Compliance, Okta, Jira

DevOps Engineer

2022 - 2022
Blue East
  • Provisioned and managed production AWS and Azure infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible, supporting multi-region deployments for IoT and business services clients.
  • Built CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI and Azure DevOps, standardizing automated testing, security scanning, and deployment workflows to reduce release cycle time significantly.
  • Implemented centralized logging with the ELK stack and Grafana monitoring dashboards, enabling engineering teams to diagnose and resolve production incidents in under 15 minutes.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Ansible, Docker, GitLab, Azure DevOps, CI/CD Pipelines, Monitoring, DevOps, Amazon CloudFront, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), SSL Configurations, Amazon EC2, AWS DevOps, Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon RDS, Azure, GitHub Actions, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Azure Virtual Network (VNet), Snowflake, Containers, NAT, Datadog, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Identity & Access Management (IAM), Microsoft Entra, GitHub, AWS Lambda, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Azure Active Directory, Infrastructure, Deployment, Automation Engineering, Playwright, Cloudflare, MongoDB, NGINX, Ruby on Rails 8, AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Fargate, Cloud Infrastructure, ECS, Event-driven Architecture, Microservices Architecture, Distributed Systems, AWS Deployment, Automation, Grafana, Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS ALB, Observability, Containerization, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Linux, Networking, Cloud, Go, Rust, Virtualization, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Keycloak, C#, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Agile DevOps, AWS CloudFormation, Migration, Windows, Legacy Software, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), GCP DevOps, PostgreSQL, Helm, Bash, HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp, Observability Tools, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Microsoft Azure, Git, Azure Cloud Security, Network Architecture, VPN tunnels, Site-to-site VPN, VPN, Cloud Architecture, Slack, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Lambda Functions, Microsoft Azure Portal, GitOps, Security Compliance, Cybersecurity Operations, Azure DevOps Services, Ubuntu, Cloud Security, Amazon EventBridge, AWS SDK, AWS Cloud Security, Visual Studio, Solution Architecture, Domain DNS Setup, Domain Migration, IT Infrastructure, Web Hosting, Zero Trust, Continuous Integration (CI), Okta, Jira

Junior DevOps Engineer

2020 - 2022
Team4Tech solutions
  • Automated server provisioning and configuration management using Ansible and Bash scripting, reducing manual setup time and eliminating configuration drift across environments.
  • Supported CI/CD pipeline development with Jenkins and GitHub Actions, enabling automated testing and container image builds for application teams across multiple projects.
  • Managed Linux server fleets and Docker container deployments, establishing standardized image build processes and container runtime policies used across development and staging environments.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Ansible, Docker, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Bash, CI/CD Pipelines, Monitoring, DevOps, Amazon CloudFront, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), SSL Configurations, Amazon EC2, AWS DevOps, Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon RDS, Azure, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Azure Virtual Network (VNet), Containers, NAT, AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Identity & Access Management (IAM), GitHub, AWS Lambda, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Azure Active Directory, Infrastructure, Deployment, NGINX, AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Fargate, Cloud Infrastructure, ECS, AWS Deployment, Grafana, Amazon Aurora, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS ALB, Observability, Containerization, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Networking, Cloud, Virtualization, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Agile DevOps, AWS CloudFormation, Migration, Windows, Legacy Software, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), PostgreSQL, Observability Tools, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Microsoft Azure, Git, Azure Cloud Security, Network Architecture, VPN tunnels, Site-to-site VPN, VPN, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Cloud Architecture, Slack, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Microsoft Azure Portal, GitLab, Security Compliance, Cybersecurity Operations, Azure DevOps Services, Ubuntu, Cloud Security, Amazon EventBridge, Visual Studio, Solution Architecture, Domain DNS Setup, Domain Migration, IT Infrastructure, Web Hosting, Continuous Integration (CI), Jira

Experience

AWS Cloud Security Governance and Automated Remediation Framework

An enterprise operating across 14 AWS accounts had no automated security enforcement. Misconfigured S3 buckets, unencrypted volumes, and overprivileged IAM roles were discovered only through manual audits running days behind the actual state of the environment.

I designed and deployed an event-driven security governance framework using AWS Config rules, Amazon EventBridge, and AWS Lambda. The system continuously evaluates resource configurations against defined security baselines and triggers automated remediation functions when violations are detected. Findings are aggregated into AWS Security Hub and surfaced through custom Grafana dashboards for the security team.

The result was a reduction in mean time to remediation from hours to under five minutes, with all 14 accounts brought under consistent policy enforcement. The architecture is fully expressed in Terraform and deploys in under 30 minutes to any new account through the AWS Organizations pipeline.

GitOps-based Kubernetes Deployment Platform with Argo CD

An engineering team managing seven Kubernetes clusters across two cloud environments faced deployment inconsistencies, slow rollback cycles, and no audit trail for configuration changes. Manual kubectl operations caused environment drift and painful recovery processes during incidents.

I designed and implemented a GitOps-based deployment platform using Argo CD and GitLab CI, establishing Git as the single source of truth for all cluster state. I configured ApplicationSets for multi-cluster synchronization, self-healing sync policies to detect and correct drift, and Prometheus with Grafana for deployment health visibility.

Deployments became fully automated and auditable. Rollbacks that previously required manual intervention dropped to under two minutes through Git revert operations. The platform handled over 200 daily deployments across all environments with zero manual kubectl operations required for standard release workflows.

Multi-cloud Infrastructure Automation Using Terraform

A fintech company operating across AWS and Azure had no consistent infrastructure provisioning process. Teams were manually configuring VPCs, compute, storage, and IAM resources through the console, resulting in environment drift, undocumented changes, and multi-day provisioning cycles before any deployment could begin.

I designed and built a modular Terraform platform covering both cloud environments, with separate module libraries for networking, compute, security groups, IAM roles, and database infrastructure. I integrated plan/apply workflows into GitLab CI pipelines with Checkov running automated policy-as-code checks before any infrastructure change reaches production. The remote state was centralized using S3 and Azure Blob with state locking to prevent concurrent modifications.

New environments that previously required days of manual work were provisioned in under 45 minutes. Infrastructure drift was eliminated through automated policy enforcement, and the codebase became the authoritative source for all cloud resources across both environments.

Certifications

MARCH 2025 - MARCH 2026

Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert

Microsoft

MARCH 2025 - MARCH 2026

Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate

Microsoft

FEBRUARY 2025 - PRESENT

ISO 27001:2022-compliant Cybersecurity: The Annex A Controls

LinkedIn

JANUARY 2021 - PRESENT

Programming Using Python

Coursera

FEBRUARY 2020 - PRESENT

AWS Solutions Architect Associate

Corvit Systems

JANUARY 2020 - PRESENT

Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)

Corvit Systems

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Playwright

Tools

Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Grafana, Azure DevOps Services, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Slack, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, GitHub, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), NGINX, AWS Fargate, AWS SDK, AWS Deployment, Amazon ElastiCache, Loki, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Step Functions, Keycloak, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Helm, HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp, Observability Tools, Git, VPN, Visual Studio, Jira

Languages

Python, Bash, Go, Rust, C#, Snowflake

Paradigms

DevSecOps, Azure DevOps, DevOps, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Automation Engineering, Event-driven Architecture, Microservices Architecture, Automation, Continuous Integration (CI)

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Docker, Ubuntu, Azure, Linux, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Red Hat Linux, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), NVIDIA CUDA, AWS ALB, Windows, LangSmith, AWS IoT

Storage

Datadog, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Azure Active Directory, MongoDB, Amazon Aurora, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, WP Engine, PostgreSQL

Other

CI/CD Pipelines, Argo CD, Cloud Security, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Lambda Functions, Cybersecurity Operations, ISO 27001, Security Compliance, Microsoft Azure Portal, Prometheus, Monitoring, GitHub Actions, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Config, Identity & Access Management (IAM), GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Cloud Architecture, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), SSL Configurations, AWS DevOps, Amazon RDS, Azure Virtual Network (VNet), GPU Computing, Containers, NAT, Microsoft Entra, IT Security, Data Engineering, Infrastructure, OpenAI, Deployment, Cloudflare, Ruby on Rails 8, AWS Auto Scaling, Cloud Infrastructure, ECS, Distributed Systems, Large Language Models (LLMs), FastAPI, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, SOC 2, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Amazon Redshift, Observability, Telemetry, Containerization, Networking, Cloud, Virtualization, AWS X-Ray, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Agile DevOps, Migration, Legacy Software, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), GCP DevOps, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Microsoft Azure, Azure Cloud Security, Network Architecture, VPN tunnels, Site-to-site VPN, AWS Cloud Security, Solution Architecture, Domain DNS Setup, Domain Migration, IT Infrastructure, Web Hosting, Zero Trust, Agentic AI Systems, Agentic AI, SOC Compliance, Okta, LangChain, Railway

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