Michelle Tsacheva, Developer in Barcelona, Spain
Michelle is available for hire
Hire Michelle

Michelle Tsacheva

Verified Expert  in Engineering

DevOps Engineer and Developer

Location
Barcelona, Spain
Toptal Member Since
September 20, 2015

Michelle is passionate about scaling projects and prototyping and starting projects quickly. She uses automation, process streamlining, and lean methodologies to get easy and consistent results quickly. Michelle has a background as a web developer and systems/DevOps engineer and a total of 18 years of professional experience in companies ranging from 10 to over 100 thousand employees.

Portfolio

Client Under NDA
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Kubernetes, Vault, Tekton...
Toptal client
Amazon Web Services (AWS), CircleCI, Web Security, PostgreSQL, AWS IAM, VPN...
Under NDA
Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Continuous Delivery (CD)...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, Atom, Python, Linux

The most amazing...

...automation I've created is a provisioning tool for Amazon to save 1,600 hours of manual engineering work in the first six months.

Work Experience

Senior DevOps Engineer

2021 - 2022
Client Under NDA
  • Created Greenfield platform for mixed load with AWS and on-prem.
  • Co-led the project observability, service mesh, and continuous integration.
  • Collaborated as a part of the senior engineers' committee to help guide the team's technical direction.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Kubernetes, Vault, Tekton, Continuous Integration (CI), Loki, Logging

DevOps Engineer

2020 - 2021
Toptal client
  • Created network architecture changes to create private subnets and restrict access to the minimum required operation.
  • Redesigned security groups to restrict access to minimum required.
  • Added minimum permissions AWS SSO (single sign-on) group permissions.
  • Implemented AWS RDS database access via temporary IAM credentials.
  • Added secure access to the company's infrastructure via managed VPN and SSH bastion host for the BI system.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), CircleCI, Web Security, PostgreSQL, AWS IAM, VPN, AWS CloudFormation, Security Groups

DevOps Engineer

2019 - 2020
Under NDA
  • Migrated Kubernetes from Heroku to Amazon EKS as part of my role.
  • Deployed a Ruby on Rails service in a Heroku backward compatible way and auxiliary services to Kubernetes using CircleCI and TeamCity.
  • Automated an AWS infrastructure with Terraform and implemented automation with Python and Shell.
Technologies: Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Deployment, TeamCity, CircleCI, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon EKS, Python, Kubernetes, Docker

Senior DevOps Engineer

2016 - 2019
Schibsted Media Group
  • Bootstrapped the observability team in Schibsted, taking over services from previous owners, defining operational procedures, and making initial service automations.
  • Created the onboarding procedure for the observability team and onboarded and mentored eight DevOps and SRE engineers.
  • Created automated provisioning for the metrics system to AWS accounts and Kubernetes namespaces. This kept us from making snowflakes in over 300 accounts and namespaces. Afterward, it was abstracted and reutilized for ten services by three teams.
  • Designed and implemented a high-availability multi-AWS region metrics and alarming system.
  • Built an AWS cost allocation and optimization platform.
  • Improved the Schibsted AWS account bootstrapping process.
  • Enabled the search engineering team and Subito in Italy, helping the teams onboard the standard Schibsted platform services, architecture, technical advice, and mentoring.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Python, Linux, DevOps, Automation, Prometheus

Senior Software Engineer

2015 - 2016
GetFinancing
  • Improved load speed of slow pages up to 90% and 50% on average (Q4 shopping season availability).
Technologies: Django, CouchDB, MongoDB, Python

Systems Engineer II - Network Monitoring

2012 - 2014
Amazon.com
  • Automated a provisioning tool for an SNMP monitoring system. It saved approximately eight hours of manual engineer work per install with about 200 installations scheduled in the following six months and used also for base lining manually provisioned installs. The system was designed to do everything from partitioning the disk, bootstrapping the system, and installing the deployment system client to post install validation and updating dashboards after the new install. It supports remote hands mode for high security networks—GovCloud for the US Department of Defense and AWS Secret region for the US Central Intelligence Agency.
  • Streamlined tools for provisioning and managing the SNMP monitoring system.
  • Built new, improved, and aggregated metrics and dashboards for SNMP monitoring system health.
  • Provisioned tool support for deployment using remote hands in high-security networks—ITAR (US Department of Defense) and private customer cloud networks (Central Intelligence Agency).
  • Built a system for managing discovery of network devices—daily rediscovery, priority (re)discovery, and device credentials rotation.
  • Performance tested and optimized a new SNMP monitoring system.
  • Communicated with third-party vendors of the SNMP monitoring system—technical and management.
Technologies: Python, Systems Engineering, DevOps, Automation

Systems Engineer — Computing Systems Infrastructure

2011 - 2012
Amazon.com
  • Developed data-center operations metrics and tools.
  • Owned an internal AWS dashboard for infrastructure teams.
  • Upgraded Amazon retail DNS, excluding Route 53, software, improving automation, and executing key upgrades.
Technologies: Engineering, MySQL, Python, Perl, DevOps

Lead Web Developer and System Administrator

2002 - 2010
Make-a-Store
  • Enabled fully automated provisioning of new customer websites in order to allow the marketing of a free product edition that requires no manual work at all.
  • Automated bandwidth accounting and quota cut offs or bandwidth surcharge depending on package.
  • Worked as part of a team, implemented the API calls and back end but not the UI.
Technologies: Memcached, NGINX, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP

Automated Provisioning for a Metrics Platform in AWS and Kubernetes

Created automated provisioning for the metrics system to AWS accounts and Kubernetes namespaces which requires only three steps to be executed. This kept us from creating potential snowflakes in over 300 accounts and namespaces. Afterwards, it was abstracted and re-utilized for 10 services by three teams.

Deployment Automation for SNMP Monitoring System

At Amazon, I created an automated provisioning tool for an SNMP monitoring system, it saved approximately 8 hours of manual engineer work per install with about 200 installations scheduled in the following six months.

The tool was also used for base lining manually provisioned installs. It was designed to do everything from partitioning the disk, bootstrapping the system, and installing the deployment system client to post-install validation and updating dashboards after the new install. It supports remote hands mode for high-security networks, including GovCloud for the US Department of Defense and AWS Secret for the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Network Device Discovery Manager

At Amazon, I created a system that performs managed discovery and re-discovery of network devices and includes them in the SNMP monitoring system. This allowed us to increase the number of monitored network devices from a single host from 150 with vendor optimized configuration to 500 while actually decreasing monitoring lag and keeping it well under SLA requirements. I added support for priority discovery or re-discovery of network devices after network engineers perform a change in the network. For increased availability, the monitoring system runs in Active/Active mode—i.e., every network device is being actively monitored by two hosts (with alarm deduplication). The discovery manager also runs in Active/Active mode without locking and with minimal state. It's integrated with Amazon's SNMP credential rotation system and written in Python.

Automated Provisioning of New Customer Websites

Enabled fully automated provisioning of new customer websites in order to allow the marketing of a free product edition that requires no manual work at all and save work for paid customer installs. Automated bandwidth accounting and quota cutoffs or bandwidth surcharge depending on package. Worked as part of a team and implemented the API calls and back end but not the user interface. It's written in PHP and MySQL.

Libraries/APIs

Bottle.py, jQuery

Tools

NGINX, Apache, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Subversion (SVN), CVS, Git, Atom, Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Grafana, Vagrant, Perforce, Terraform, CircleCI, TeamCity, AWS IAM, VPN, Vault, Logging

Paradigms

DevOps, Scrum, Kanban, Model View Presenter (MVP), Continuous Deployment, Automation, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI)

Platforms

Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Debian Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, Heroku, Xen

Storage

MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Memcached, CouchDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Datadog, MongoDB, PostgreSQL

Other

AWS DevOps, System Administration, Task Automation, Amazon Route 53, DNS, Lean Development, Systems Engineering, Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Payment Gateways, Web Security, Security Groups, Tekton, Loki, Prometheus

Languages

CSS, HTML, Python, Perl, PHP, JavaScript

Frameworks

CFEngine, Jinja, Flask, Django

2000 - 2003

Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering

Rusenski Universitet - Ruse, Bulgaria

SEPTEMBER 2009 - PRESENT

Zend Certified Engineer PHP5

Zend Technologies

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