
Dmitry Kireev
Verified Expert in Engineering
Cloud Architect Developer
New York, NY, United States
Toptal member since November 21, 2019
Dmitry, a principal infrastructure engineer with 17 years of experience, has contributed to exits and IPOs exceeding $140 million. He excels in building scalable infrastructure from inception to acquisition, focusing on crisis intervention, rapid transformation, and optimizing infrastructure costs (achieving reductions of 65-85%).
Portfolio
Experience
- Bash - 15 years
- Linux - 14 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 13 years
- DevOps - 10 years
- Terraform - 8 years
- Docker - 6 years
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) - 5 years
- Amazon EKS - 1 year
Preferred Environment
Terraform, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Serverless, Amazon EKS, CI/CD Pipelines, Cloud Engineering, Cost Cutting (Cost-out), Crisis Management
The most amazing...
...achievement is building an IoT platform from inception to $87.8 million acquisition by Fortune Brands/Moen (NYSE: FBIN) with 99.999% uptime.
Work Experience
Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Founder
KIRR LLC
- Founded a US-based consultancy providing principal infrastructure services to Series A/B startups with 10-50 employees.
- Recently engaged to resolve a 2-year production crisis within 48 hours, resulting in a 73% reduction in AWS costs, saving $132,000 annually.
- Focused on crisis intervention, cost optimization, and infrastructure scaling to support rapid growth.
- Provided hands-on principal engineering with strategic oversight, facilitating knowledge transfer to client teams.
- Operated a remote-first engagement model with a NYC base, while also providing on-site client support.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
MAP Digital, Inc.
- Mitigated a critical 2-year production issue in 48 hours for the enterprise event platform. Resolved it in two months.
- Reduced AWS infrastructure costs by 73%, from $15,000 to $4,000 monthly, saving $132,000 annually.
- Achieved 99.99% uptime for the platform supporting 70,000-attendee conferences for major financial institutions.
- Diagnosed and fixed complex memory leak through systematic profiling and analysis.
- Recovered tens of thousands in SLA credits by implementing venue-site monitoring that proved telecom vendor fault (packet loss, connection drops) during critical events.
- Implemented comprehensive observability, enabling 10x team productivity and vendor accountability.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Shift Lab
- Built serverless infrastructure from zero, enabling a major transportation company's digital transformation.
- Empowered engineers to build a scalable system supporting thousands of transactions daily at a fraction of traditional cost.
- Integrated legacy IBM DB2 with modern cloud architecture, preserving business continuity.
- Achieved 50+ daily deployments from zero baseline through self-service infrastructure (2000+ to date).
- Reduced infrastructure costs by 50% through RDS optimization and serverless architecture.
- Delivered a sustainable platform, operational for 3+ years.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Founder
HazelOps
- Served as principal infrastructure engineer to high-growth companies through strategic consulting engagements.
- Enabled over $140 million in client exits and acquisitions through repeatable infrastructure patterns and hands-on implementation.
- Published open source Terraform modules with 500,000+ combined downloads on Terraform Registry.
- Built Estonian operations to access senior European engineering talent, enabling 24/7 infrastructure coverage.
- Established an engagement model focused on long-term partnerships lasting 2-3 years and targeted crisis interventions ranging from 1-3 months.
- Achieved 65-85% cost reductions while improving reliability to 99.99%+ across 50+ client engagements.
Infrastructure Performance Consultant
ADP, Inc.
- Brought in to diagnose and resolve critical performance crisis in a complex post-acquisition environment.
- Untangled overwhelming technical complexity to identify root causes of application slowness.
- Implemented distributed tracing and monitoring after a 6-month internal deadlock, providing critical visibility.
- Partnered with DBA to identify database bottlenecks and optimization opportunities.
- Implemented APM monitoring for workers using OpenTracing after carefully evaluating options plausible within the corporate environment.
- Broke through organizational paralysis to deliver actionable performance insights.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Safer Kid, Inc
- Redesigned legacy infrastructure from three unmanaged EC2 instances to modern EKS with Helm charts.
- Built secure, isolated, and reliable infrastructure aligned with business security requirements.
- Implemented complete infrastructure as code with Terraform, enabling reproducible deployments.
- Designed CI/CD-ready pipeline architecture (not implemented due to time constraints).
- Delivered AWS Well-Architected Framework compliance with CloudTrail and Config monitoring.
- Completed critical transformation over the holiday period, ahead of schedule.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Sema Technologies, Inc
- Redirected misguided GitHub Action request to the proper solution: production-ready infrastructure they actually needed.
- Architected and built a complete AWS infrastructure from zero to production in four weeks.
- Designed containerized ECS architecture with VPC, EFS, and SQS for an AI code scanning platform.
- Prevented a 2-3 month wrong path and delivered the right solution in 1 month.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
SimplyWise, Inc.
- Addressed a critical crisis intervention involving receipt upload failures that blocked core business functions without an apparent solution in sight.
- Diagnosed a root cause previously missed by others, involving Django header parsing, ALB ingress limitations, and a mobile timeout cascade.
- Architected a solution by switching from ALB to NGINX ingress for more granular header control, effectively preventing timeouts.
- Resolved an elusive user-facing error after weeks of unsuccessful debugging attempts by others.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
SofaBet Co.
- Led the betting platform to GLI (Gaming Laboratories International) certification as an external infrastructure consultant.
- Implemented critical code signing infrastructure, a mandatory prerequisite for GLI certification. This intervention was essential to enable certification and prevent blockage of market entry.
- Architected a secure CI/CD pipeline with code signing integrated at every deployment stage.
- Established compliance-ready infrastructure meeting strict gaming industry regulatory requirements.
- Unblocked $10+ million revenue opportunity by enabling regulatory certification.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Chicks Gold Inc.
- Executed crisis intervention by resolving frequent production downtimes that were negatively impacting revenue.
- Proposed and architected a complete infrastructure redesign for the EKS/Rancher cluster.
- Eliminated downtime through a zero-downtime CI/CD pipeline on Azure DevOps.
- Transformed an unreliable platform into a stable, rapid-delivery system supporting business growth.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
ONFO, LLC
- Built a complete AWS infrastructure from scratch for a blockchain fintech startup.
- Accelerated deployment velocity to 100+ deployments per day with zero downtime.
- Architected immutable infrastructure for private Stellar blockchain nodes - the core product offering.
- Containerized legacy .NET monoliths to ECS, enabling microservices transformation.
- Enabled startup to scale from prototype to production-ready financial platform.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Wizard Inc
- Brought in after previous consultants failed to scale AI/GPU infrastructure for production workloads.
- Architected multi-account AWS infrastructure handling state-of-the-art detection algorithms on GPU nodes.
- Containerized complex Python/CUDA machine learning pipelines to ECS, achieving scalability the previous team could not attain.
- Designed auto-scaling GPU clusters, reducing compute costs by 60% while improving inference speed by 3x.
- Enabled AI product launch after months of failed scaling attempts.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Tatango, Inc.
- Modernized a 14-year-old platform handling $600+ million in nonprofit fundraising to handle 10x volume.
- Migrated legacy Rails monolith to containerized ECS without disrupting active fundraising campaigns.
- Enabled deployment during peak campaigns (previously forbidden) through zero-downtime CI/CD.
- Designed a fault-tolerant architecture to prevent campaign failures that could cost nonprofits millions.
- Enhanced platform capabilities to handle surges during disaster relief campaigns without requiring manual intervention.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Patron Technology, Inc.
- Built a complete AWS infrastructure from the ground up for an event technology startup.
- Architected scalable ECS-based platform supporting rapid product iteration.
- Established CI/CD foundation with zero-downtime deployments and 100+ daily deployment capacity.
Principal Infrastructure Engineer
Moen
- Built IoT infrastructure from scratch, enabling $87.8 million acquisition by Fortune Brands/Moen (NYSE: FBIN).
- Achieved 99.999% uptime for home water damage prevention system protecting billions in property value.
- Architected a platform with 1+ million device capacity while reducing costs by 70% compared to AWS IoT.
- Resolved critical MQTT data storms preventing insurance partnership disruption.
- Designed a zero-downtime Kafka architecture enabling continuous deployment.
- Delivered Fortune 500-grade infrastructure meeting Moen's acquisition requirements.
DevOps Architect
Delphix
- Spearheaded an automated bare metal provisioning system, reducing deployment time from days to hours per host.
- Designed a hybrid cloud testing infrastructure supporting core product validation across AWS and on-premise.
- Built Foreman-based provisioning, replacing manual processes and saving hundreds of engineering hours annually.
- Implemented ELK stack for centralized logging across hybrid infrastructure.
- Developed nmap-based automated inventory system for infrastructure discovery and management.
DevOps Architect
Intuit
- Managed hybrid infrastructure with 300+ nodes across AWS, VMware, and bare metal.
- Created Wimaging solution for Windows bare metal provisioning, accelerating datacenter deployments.
- Achieved 90% infrastructure automation using Puppet, reducing manual operations significantly.
- Led post-acquisition infrastructure integration project, ensuring business continuity.
- Pioneered open-source adoption in the Windows environment (Chocolatey, Foreman, Wimaging).
DevOps Engineer
Docstoc
- Supported infrastructure through $50 million acquisition by Intuit with 99.9% uptime across 180+ servers.
- Spearheaded Puppet implementation from scratch, enabling infrastructure-as-code for a heterogeneous environment.
- Built a Logstash observability platform, significantly reducing downtime and contributing to acquisition readiness.
- Implemented one-click deployment system: 5-minute full-farm deployments with zero downtime.
- Automated backup systems and monitoring, preventing $100,000+ monthly revenue loss from potential outages.
Experience
Atun: Secure Tag-based Tunnelling
https://atun.ioThis tool allows you to connect to private resources (RDS, Redis, etc) via routers.
In order for the tool to work, your EC2 host must employ the correct tag schema. At the moment, it has two types of tags: Atun Version and Atun Host.
Version tag name = atun.io/version
Version tag value =
Env tag name = atun.io/env
Env tag value =
Host tag name = atun.io/host/
Host tag value = {"local":"","proto":"","remote":}
IZE Infrastructure Tool
https://github.com/hazelops/izeIt combines infra, build, and deploy workflows in one and is too simple to be considered sophisticated. So let's not do it but rather embrace the simplicity and minimalism.
ECS App Terraform Module
https://github.com/hazelops/terraform-aws-ecs-appFeatures:
• Deploy Worker application: No Application Load Balancer (ALB) is required.
• Deploy web application: Includes ALB, AWS Certificate Manager, and Route 53 integration.
• ECR repo Management.
• Naming convention.
• Deployment: Supports deployment via Terraform and external tools like ecs-deploy or ize.
• Datadog integration.
• Autoscaling: Supports both scheduled and trigger-based autoscaling.
• Supports EC2 or Fargate.
• Supports Elastic IP assignment.
• Resource configuration: Configurable CPU and memory resources.
• Manages Elastic File System mounts and shares.
• Supports GPU-based ECS instances.
• Multiple ECS network modes.
• Root block device configuration.
• Automatic Nginx Proxy.
• Firelens/Datadog log driver.
• ECS Exec (console into the container).
• Supports temporary file storage configuration.
Windows Imaging Toolkit
https://github.com/AutomationD/wimagingAll relevant configuration files like unattend.xml are rendered by Foreman and downloaded at build time.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Business Communication (English)
Tula State University - Tula, Russia
Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration
Tula State University - Tula, Russia
Skills
Libraries/APIs
AWS Amplify, Amazon API, Node.js, Slack API, TensorFlow, Terragrunt
Tools
Git, GNU Make, Ansible, AWS CloudFormation, ELK (Elastic Stack), GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, Docker Compose, Grafana, Telegraf, CircleCI, Travis CI, Traefik, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), GitHub, VPN, AWS Fargate, Amazon CloudFront CDN, AWS IAM, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Deployment, Cron, Observability Tools, MQTT, Docker Swarm, NGINX, Puppet, Jenkins, Amazon EKS, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), RabbitMQ, Celery, TeamCity, Nagios, Makefile, AWS CodeDeploy, Jira, Helm, Confluence, Splunk, Stellar SDK, AWS CodeBuild, ChatGPT, Apache Airflow, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Parameter Store, Amazon Cognito, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), Google Compute Engine (GCE), AWS Systems Manager, Redmine, Auth0
Languages
Python, Bash, Java, PHP, Markdown, Go, JavaScript, SQL, TypeScript
Paradigms
Agile, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), DevOps, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, Serverless Architecture, API Observability, REST, Azure DevOps, Load Testing, Automation, Agile Software Development, Testing
Platforms
Linux, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Windows, AWS Cloud Computing Services, Ubuntu, Apache Kafka, JVM, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Azure, WordPress, New Relic, Windows Server, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Blockchain, Rancher, AWS ALB, AWS IoT
Storage
Datadog, Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, MongoDB, InfluxDB, Redis, On-premise, Amazon DynamoDB, Redis Cache, Elasticsearch, MySQL/MariaDB, Databases, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Amazon EFS, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
Frameworks
Flask, Django, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Windows PowerShell, .NET, Serverless Framework
Industry Expertise
Cybersecurity
Other
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Networking, GitHub Actions, AWS DevOps, SSL Certificates, Digital Certificates, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon RDS, Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), SSL, Cloud, Containerization, AWS Cloud Architecture, Containers, Deployment, Cloud Architecture, Container Orchestration, Agile DevOps, Monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Monitoring, Cloud Infrastructure, Architecture, Infrastructure, Network Security, Load Balancers, Scaling, Cloud Migration, Startups, System Administration, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Cloud Engineering, Cloud Security, DevOps Engineer, Networks, Reliability, Reliability Engineering, Operational Excellence, Operational Readiness, Infrastructure Testing, Internet of Things (IoT), AWS NAT Gateway, APIs, Enterprise Architecture, CORS, Operational Control, Disaster Recovery Consulting, Argo CD, Time Series Data, SOC 2, TICK Stack, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Foreman, Juniper, LB, ECS, Serverless, HAProxy, Communication, English, Business, Economics, Software Development, Business Planning, Cloudflare, Hospitality, Network Monitoring, Machine Learning, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), Autoscaling, Amazon Route 53, SSH, Time Series, Amazon Redshift, Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP), Sharding, Multitenancy, Cost Cutting (Cost-out), Crisis Management
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