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Mihai Plesa, Large-scale Web Crawlers Developer in London, United Kingdom
Mihai Plesa

Large-scale Web Crawlers Developer in London, United Kingdom

Member since June 12, 2018
Mihai is a general IT specialist with 12+ years of experience, keen on having a meaningful impact at and outside of the workplace. He's an Agile practitioner, passionate about automation and optimization of processes in a holistic way, and he's worked with a wide set of projects and technologies around DevOps, including development itself. Industries include banking, finance, insurance, media, IoT, translation, privacy, security, and blockchain.
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Portfolio

Experience

Location

London, United Kingdom

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Linux, Windows, macOS, Visual Studio Code, IDEA

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on is Brave browser, releasing it continuously to our millions of users.

Employment

  • DevOps Engineering Manager

    2018 - PRESENT
    Brave Browser and Basic Attention Token (BAT)
    • Led a team distributed on three continents that specializes in scaling and delivering our browser, content creator rewards platform, and private ad ecosystem to millions of users.
    • Provided solutions at the intersection of large-scale crawling and scraping, machine learning, data pipelines, performance testing, privacy, and security.
    Technologies: Python, Go, Node.js, C++, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Heroku, Chromium

  • Director

    2015 - PRESENT
    Here to Optimize
    • Provided DevOps and cloud consulting to clients in various industries.
    Technologies: Linux, AWS, Python, Docker, Terraform, Chatbots, Scraping, Crawling

  • Solution Architect and Java Developer (Contract)

    2018 - 2018
    Policy Expert
    • Implemented a flexible monitoring solution for the AWS estate.
    Technologies: Java 8, Python, Go, AWS SDK, Lambda, CloudFormation, EC2, SNS, CloudWatch, Graphite, Datadog, Micrometer

  • DevOps Consultant and Python Developer (Contract)

    2016 - 2018
    Barclays Investment
    • Provided consulting for bank-wide cloud migration together with AWS Professional Services consultants.
    • Designed and developed a cloud resource provisioning tool handling centralized setup, patching, upgrade, and teardown of thousands of AWS accounts.
    • Led greenfield implementation of a functional infrastructure testing framework which ensures role permissions and capabilities are propagated correctly according to the compliance and security model.
    • Set up continuous integration pipelines.
    • Facilitated cultural transformation by improving processes and aided the transition from Waterfall to Agile methodologies.
    • Onboarded new team members.
    Technologies: Windows, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Python, PowerShell, OpenShift, Docker, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Amazon Web Services (EC2, Lambda, VPC, ELB, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, IAM, KMS, S3, SNS, SQS, RDS, Kinesis), VDI, RPM, BDD, Boto3

  • DevOps Systems Engineer (contract)

    2016 - 2016
    Mergermarket Group
    • Containerized and converted various on-premises monoliths into microservices on AWS.
    • Managed and tuned Docker in production, implementing custom monitoring metrics.
    • Implemented serverless Amazon ECS autoscaling based on cluster resource utilization.
    • Led migration from Docker Registry to Amazon ECR.
    • Used Ansible for rolling out updates to servers in the datacenters and AWS.
    • Onboarded new colleagues and remote teams.
    • Configured Jenkins and TeamCity.
    • Configured firewalls and proxies.
    • Reduced and optimized cloud infrastructure bills.
    • Provided on-call rotation and 24/7 production support.
    Technologies: Linux, Centos, Ubuntu, Bash/Shell, Python, Node.js, Ansible, Docker, Terraform, Vagrant, Packer, Amazon Web Services (EC2, EC2 Container Service, Lambda, VPC, Route53, RDS, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, IAM, EFS, S3, SNS, SQS), AWS CLI, AWS SDK, MySQL

  • Senior Platform Engineer

    2014 - 2015
    AlertMe (British Gas Connected Homes)
    • Collaborated with the core team behind the largest Internet of Things platform in the UK (which powers the Hive ecosystem of smart devices, with more than 200,000 users).
    • Optimized the continuous delivery pipeline, enabling faster shipping to production, from 2-3 months to 1 week.
    • Performed deployments and troubleshooting of multiple distributed components.
    • Implemented remote logging and monitoring for various components, drastically simplifying debugging and allowing complex analytics.
    • Introduced Ansible and used it to build an operational configuration management framework.
    • Participated in third-line production support.
    • Contributed to open-source projects on GitHub.
    Technologies: Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, Bash/Shell, Ruby, Java, Ansible, Puppet, Packer, Vagrant, VirtualBox, Amazon Web Services (EC2, VPC, Route53, RDS, CloudFormation, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, IAM, S3, SNS, SQS), AWS CLI, AWS SDK, MySQL, Cassandra, KairosDB, Rabbit

  • Continuous Delivery Engineer

    2011 - 2014
    Language Weaver (SDL)
    • Owned continuous delivery, managing 120+ Jenkins projects and 40+ servers.
    • Automated and improved build, release, testing, and deployment processes, leading to faster feedback and validation (up to 20x) and shorter release cycles (several weeks instead of 3-6 months).
    • Designed and implemented configuration management and infrastructure monitoring solutions, which improved scalability and DevOps team productivity multiple times.
    • Implemented continuous integration best practices on in-house projects having defined standards, optimized build processes, performed test automation, implemented one-click deployment, reporting, and ensured quality tracking.
    • Researched, benchmarked, and built proofs of concept on various technologies and tools.
    • Led migration from legacy technologies, from Subversion to Git and from Ant to Maven.
    • Provided support to colleagues together with the DevOps team.
    • Mentored and coached interns.
    Technologies: Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat, Bash/Shell, Java, Groovy, Jenkins, Hudson, Ant, Maven, Nexus, Sonar, Ansible, Spring, Grails, REST, PHP, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, TestNG, JUnit, Cucumber, JMeter, Selenium, WebDriver, Httpd, Tomcat, ActiveMQ

  • Software Development Engineer in Test

    2008 - 2011
    Audicon
    • Developed a test manager and runner for black box API testing and raised code coverage to 80%.
    • Implemented a flexible data generator.
    • Developed a tool for test data randomization and stochastic testing.
    • Created an auto-deploying tool pack enabling configuration management on tens of test servers.
    • Developed a web application and related scripts for collecting status and information about servers.
    • Set up network monitoring with SMS alerts and automatic server shutdown in case of power outage.
    • Implemented a solution for employee paperwork automation, reports, and invoice management.
    • Defined storage, virtualization, and IT acquisition strategy along with managers.
    Technologies: C#, .NET Framework, ASP.NET, IIS, SQL Server, TFS, Visual Studio, MSBuild, PowerShell, VBScript, Microsoft Office SDK, Linux, CentOS, Red Hat, Windows Server, Active Directory, Hyper-V, Citrix, VMware ESXi, VirtualBox

Experience

  • LinkedIn Scraping Bot (Development)
    https://github.com/mihaiplesa/linkedin-scraping-bot-python

    This is a personal project written in Python for scraping LinkedIn.

    It basically logs in an account and finds and visits profiles based on keywords and extracts data from them.

    I led design and implementation.

  • Instagram Bot (Development)
    https://github.com/mihaiplesa/instagram-bot-python

    This is a personal project written in Python for gaining Instagram followers.

    It basically logs in an account and finds and visits profiles based on hashtags and follows them and likes their photos.

    I led design and implementation.

  • AWS ECS Fargate Sample Architecture with Terraform (Development)
    https://github.com/mihaiplesa/terraform-aws-ecs-fargate

    Personal project to illustrate the use of various technologies like Terraform, AWS ECS, ECR, Fargate, ALB, ACM, Route53, CodePipeline and CodeDeploy, and best practices.

    I led architecture, design, and implementation.

Skills

  • Languages

    Bash, Python, Gherkin, Python 2, Python 3, Bash Script, JavaScript, Java, Groovy, Ruby, HTML, VBScript, C#, Perl, PHP, CSS, Go, C++, C

  • Frameworks

    Selenium, Spring, TestNG, JUnit, Nose, Windows PowerShell, AWS HA, ASP.NET, .NET, Grails, Ruby on Rails (RoR)

  • Libraries/APIs

    WebDriver, Selenium WebDriver, Jenkins Pipeline, Jenkins Job DSL, GitHub API, Carbon, Selenium Grid, Node.js, AMQP

  • Tools

    Git, Shell, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CLI, AWS Fargate, AWS ECS, AWS EBS, AWS ECR, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon SQS, AWS Push Notification Service (AWS SNS), AWS ELB, AWS IAM, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Artifactory, Sonar, SonarQube, TeamCity, Behave, Cucumber, Boto, Boto 3, Docker Compose, VirtualBox, Subversion (SVN), Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, AWS SDK, Puppet, Chef, GitHub, GitLab, RabbitMQ, ELK (Elastic Stack), Graylog, Nagios, Fastly, Logstash, Apache Tomcat, Nginx, Maven, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Kibana, Grafana, Make, Pytest, Zabbix, RPM, Microsoft Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Sentry, Vagrant, Packer, Gradle, Travis CI, CloudFlare, Amazon EKS, AWS CloudFormation, MongoDB Atlas, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Hyper-V, MSBuild, TFS, SaltStack, ActiveMQ, Apache JMeter, Solr, Vault, Apache ZooKeeper, Etcd, Bazel

  • Paradigms

    Serverless Architecture, Microservices, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), DevOps, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Test-driven Development (TDD), REST, Data Science

  • Platforms

    Docker, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, AWS EC2, Windows, Azure, PagerDuty, New Relic, CentOS, Fedora, Linux RHEL/CentOS, Red Hat Linux, Debian, Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Heroku, MacOS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Nexus, OpenShift, Kali Linux, Kubernetes

  • Storage

    AWS S3, Amazon EFS, Datadog, Google Cloud, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Memcached, AWS RDS, AWS DynamoDB, Hazelcast, KairosDB, Cassandra, Couchbase, CouchDB, RethinkDB, Amazon Aurora

  • Other

    Lambda Functions, AWS CodePipeline, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Shell Scripting, Bash Scripting, Serverless, System Administration, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified Solution Architect, AWS Certified SysOps Aministrator, AWS, Cloud, AWS DevOps, IT Infrastructure, Data Scientist, RHEL, Consul, SSL, HTTPS, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Graphite, Netflix OSS, Oracle VM VirtualBox, HAProxy, Ubuntu Server, IIS, Chromium, Browsers, APM, Scraping, Large-scale Web Crawlers, Web Crawlers, Web Scraping, LDAP, Apache Cassandra, Octopus Deploy

Education

  • Master of Science degree in Computer Networks and Distributed Systems
    2010 - 2012
    Technical University of Cluj-Napoca - Cluj-Napoca
  • Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science
    2006 - 2010
    Technical University of Cluj-Napoca - Cluj-Napoca
Certifications
  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
    APRIL 2018 - APRIL 2021
    AWS
  • AWS Certified Developer
    APRIL 2018 - APRIL 2021
    AWS
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect
    APRIL 2018 - APRIL 2021
    AWS
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
    FEBRUARY 2018 - FEBRUARY 2021
    AWS
  • Online Marketing Academy Graduate
    OCTOBER 2013 - PRESENT
    Google
  • Microsoft Data Platform Competency (Sales, Marketing, Licensing)
    SEPTEMBER 2010 - PRESENT
    Microsoft

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