Halim is available for hire
Hire HalimHalim Gebrael
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and AWS Developer
Hadath, Mount Lebanon Governorate, Lebanon
Toptal member since May 17, 2021
Bio
Halim is a senior site reliability engineer experienced in designing, automating, and operating production infrastructure across AWS and Azure. He specializes in Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Terraform, Pulumi, CI/CD, and observability with Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana. Halim builds secure, resilient cloud platforms and improves reliability through automation, incident response, and cost optimization.
Portfolio
CloudHarbor S.A.L
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)...
Aurea
DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Automation, Ansible...
Tecnotree
Value-added Services (VAS), Telecom Business Support Systems (BSS), Linux...
Experience
- Linux - 12 years
- DevOps Engineer - 10 years
- Cloud Computing - 10 years
- Kubernetes - 8 years
- Terraform - 7 years
- GitLab - 7 years
- VMware - 5 years
- Pulumi - 4 years
Preferred Environment
Terraform, DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Bash, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Automation, Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Cloudflare, Azure
The most amazing...
...Modernized production platforms across AWS EKS and Azure AKS using IaC and automation, improving reliability, security, and scalability.
Work Experience
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
2022 - PRESENT
CloudHarbor S.A.L
- Designed, implemented, and maintained highly available, scalable, and secure cloud platforms on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
- Architected and managed large-scale Kubernetes environments using Amazon EKS and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), supporting mission-critical production workloads.
- Developed Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using Terraform and Pulumi, enabling automated, repeatable, and version-controlled infrastructure deployments.
- Built and optimized end-to-end CI/CD pipelines, significantly improving deployment speed, consistency, and release reliability.
- Automated infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment, reducing manual effort and operational risk.
- Implemented comprehensive observability platforms using Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana, creating actionable dashboards, alerting strategies, and performance monitoring for distributed systems.
- Led reliability initiatives by defining SLIs, SLOs, incident response processes, and operational best practices to improve system availability and reduce MTTR.
- Performed infrastructure capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization across cloud environments.
- Designed secure networking architectures, identity management, and platform access controls using solutions such as Teleport.
- Implemented and managed Cloudflare services, including DNS, CDN, WAF, DDoS protection, SSL/TLS, Zero Trust, and traffic routing to improve security, resilience, and global application performance.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Amazon EKS, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Cloudflare, Terraform, Pulumi, Docker, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Ansible, NGINX, Envoy Gateway, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub, GitLab Runner, Identity & Access Management (IAM), AWS IAM, Teleport, Datadog, Monitoring, Observability, Linux, Python, Git, DNS, AWS Cloud Architecture, AWS Landing Zone, Automation, Ansible AWX, Infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Grafana, Prometheus, AWS ECS Fargate, AWS Security Hub, AWS WAF, Single Sign-on (SSO), AWS Secrets Manager, CI/CD Pipelines, Release Management
Senior Site Reliability and DevOps Engineer
2015 - 2022
Aurea
- Designed, managed, and led the company’s migration activities from legacy data centers to AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS, and VMware on IBM.
- Managed thousands of Linux and Windows servers in the cloud.
- Designed and built a highly available hybrid cloud infrastructure on AWS and Azure.
- Developed infrastructure automation scripts and performed corrective and preventive maintenance activities on live production systems.
- Delivered CI/CDs for several products using DevOps methodology.
- Installed, managed, and created monitoring for infrastructure and applications.
- Hired, coached, and managed a team of nine SREs to deliver the migration activities and built a highly scalable and hybrid infrastructure for our customers.
- Ran cost optimization tasks on AWS to decrease cost and move the products to a microservice architecture for better resiliency and scalability, decreasing infrastructure and operational costs.
Technologies: DevOps Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Automation, Ansible, Python, Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bash Script, DNS, BIND, HAProxy, NAT, Apache, Nagios, Monitoring, Amazon EC2, DevOps, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Load Balancers, AWS Cloud Architecture, Healthcare, HIPAA Compliance, Kubernetes, Containerization, AWS CloudFormation, Configuration Management
VAS & BSS Consultant
2012 - 2015
Tecnotree
- Contributed to organizational project management activities such as project. charter and project management plan preparation.
- Provided input to sales and pre-sales teams related to RFXs and estimated. efforts and budgets required for each project.
- Installed BSS And VAS platforms on customer's on-premises.
- Performed corrective maintenance activities such as troubleshooting, resolution implementation, documentation production, and reporting of a trouble incident for live VAS and BSS services and platforms.
- Completed the installation and integration of the Tecnotree convergent billing. system and billing and invoicing platform at OMANTEL.
- Completed the “Call Completion Project” at DU UAE as a project manager and onsite engineer improving the voicemail experience for end users and increasing company profit.
- Completed the “Call Completion Project” at Zain KSA as project manager which helped to increase company profit.
- Led a team of five support engineers to deliver onsite installations for several VAS products. Assigned tasks and resources as required and followed up regularly to ensure delivery of major milestones.
- Drove several meetings with customers to discuss project technical requirements and address customers' concerns related to security, compliance, and redundancy.
Technologies: Value-added Services (VAS), Telecom Business Support Systems (BSS), Linux, Databases, SS7, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Project Management, Bash Script, DNS, BIND, HAProxy, NAT, Nagios, Monitoring, Amazon EC2, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Load Balancers
VAS Engineer
2009 - 2012
MODULUS Telecom
- Contributed to the pre-sales and delivery activities for mobile solutions (ringback tones, instant messaging, call completion platform, roaming, USSD,. messaging GW, voice SMS, and SDP) and international airtime transfer.
- Handled the RFI/RFP proposals, study, and ranking of mobile solutions.
- Developed the Modulus Mediation solution: a cloud-based solution (AWS) whose purpose is to connect mobile application back ends with mobile operator networks.
- Installed the company's VAS products for customers on-premise.
- Provided support to our customer by troubleshooting different protocols (diameter, SMPP, CAP2, MAP, SS7, SIP, SIP-I, HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTP, RTCP, SIGTRAN, and more).
- Performed capacity planning, license expansions, and hardware upgrades based on system utilization and statistical trends.
Technologies: Presales, Value-added Services (VAS), Linux, Databases, SS7, C++, Bash Script, DNS, NAT
Experience
Lift and Shift for Jive
https://www.jivesoftware.com/Completed a Lift and Shift project for Jive, increasing infrastructure quality while reducing costs by $1.5 million. This project allowed Jive customers to leverage the major benefits of the cloud, including better scalability and flexibility. In addition, it increased the performance by 20% and resolved most customer complaints.
Call Completion Project at DU UAE
http://www.tecnotree.comInstalled the Tecnotree Call completion platform at DU UAE. Integrated the system with the customer MSC to exchange singling traffic and combined it with SMSC using SMPP and SS7 protocols and OSS for alerting and monitoring. This improved the voicemail experience for end-users and increased company profit.
SLI Lift and Shift
Completed a Lift and Shift project for SLI, increasing infrastructure quality while reducing costs by $1 million. This project allowed SLI customers to leverage the major benefits of the cloud, including better scalability and flexibility. In addition, it increased the performance by 20% and resolved most customer complaints.
Legacy Microgateway to Cloudflare WAF Migration
Led the migration of production applications from a legacy microgateway platform to Cloudflare WAF. The project included application onboarding, DNS and traffic-routing changes, WAF policy configuration, TLS certificate management, DDoS protection, testing, and rollback planning. The migration strengthened application security, simplified operations, and improved the scalability and resilience of the web-protection platform.
NGINX Ingress Controller to Envoy Gateway Migration
Led the migration of Kubernetes ingress traffic from the NGINX Ingress Controller to Envoy Gateway. The project included translating ingress configurations to the Kubernetes Gateway API, configuring routing and TLS, validating application compatibility, improving observability, and executing a controlled rollout with rollback planning. The migration modernized traffic management and improved the platform’s security, scalability, and reliability.
Education
2003 - 2009
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Communication Engineer
Holy Spirit University of Kaslik - USEK - Lebanon
Certifications
NOVEMBER 2021 - NOVEMBER 2024
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
AWS
OCTOBER 2021 - OCTOBER 2024
AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty
Amazon Web Services
DECEMBER 2020 - NOVEMBER 2024
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
AWS
Skills
Tools
Nagios, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Terraform, VMware, Amazon EKS, GitLab, GitHub, Grafana, Ansible, Puppet, Apache, NGINX, AWS CloudFormation, GitLab CI/CD, GitLab Runner, AWS IAM, Git
Languages
Bash Script, Python, Bash, Java, C++
Platforms
Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, Docker
Paradigms
Automation, DevOps, HIPAA Compliance
Storage
Databases, PostgreSQL, MySQL, HDFS, Datadog
Industry Expertise
Project Management, Healthcare
Frameworks
Hadoop
Other
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Load Balancers, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), DevOps Engineer, Value-added Services (VAS), SS7, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), SIP, DNS, BIND, NAT, Monitoring, VMware NSX, Pulumi, Prometheus, AWS Cloud Architecture, Containerization, Security, AWS ECS Fargate, AWS Security Hub, AWS WAF, Single Sign-on (SSO), AWS Secrets Manager, CI/CD Pipelines, Configuration Management, Release Management, Cloud Computing, Telecom Business Support Systems (BSS), Presales, HAProxy, MySQL DBA, Amazon RDS, VMware vCloud, VMware VMotion, Elastic Load Balancers, Cloudflare, Envoy Gateway, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Teleport, Observability, AWS Landing Zone, Ansible AWX, Infrastructure, Web Application Firewall (WAF)
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