Mihai Plesa
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Developer
Mihai is a general IT specialist with 15+ years of experience, keen on having a meaningful impact at and outside the workplace. He's an agile practitioner, passionate about automation and optimization of processes in a holistic way. Mihail has worked with a wide set of projects and technologies around DevOps, including development and industries such as banking, finance, insurance, media, IoT, translation, privacy, security, and blockchain.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
IDEA IDE, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), MacOS, Windows, Linux
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on is the Brave browser, releasing it continuously to our millions of users.
Work Experience
Senior DevOps Director
Brave Browser and Basic Attention Token (BAT)
- Led a team distributed on three continents specializing 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.
- Scaled our browser and services to over 60 million users a month.
Director
Here to Optimize
- Provided DevOps and cloud consulting to clients in various industries.
- Offered end-to-end digital transformation services.
- Provided cultural coaching and a transformation for more agile delivery.
Solution Architect and Java Developer (Contract)
Policy Expert
- Implemented a flexible monitoring solution for the AWS estate.
- Researched and evaluated various monitoring solutions.
- Applied various optimizations to reduce the cloud cost.
DevOps Consultant and Python Developer (Contract)
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 that ensures role permissions and capabilities are propagated correctly according to the compliance and security model.
- Set up continuous integration pipelines using Jenkins.
- Facilitated a cultural transformation by improving processes and aided the transition from Waterfall to Agile methodologies.
- Onboarded and mentored new and existing team members.
DevOps Systems Engineer (Contract)
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 internal Docker Registry to Amazon ECR.
- Used Ansible for rolling out updates to servers in the datacenters and AWS.
- Onboarded new colleagues and off-site team members.
- Configured Jenkins and TeamCity for continuous integration.
- Configured various policies in firewalls and proxies.
- Reduced and optimized the cloud infrastructure bills.
- Provided an on-call rotation and 24/7 production support.
Senior Platform Engineer
AlertMe (British Gas Connected Homes)
- Collaborated with the core team behind the largest Internet of things platform in the UK. The platform powers the Hive ecosystem of smart devices, with more than 200,000 users.
- Optimized the continuous delivery pipeline, enabling faster shipping to production, from two or three months to one 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 the third-line production support and on-call.
- Contributed to various open-source projects on GitHub.
Continuous Delivery Engineer
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 and reporting, and ensured quality tracking.
- Researched, benchmarked, and built proofs of concept on various technologies and tools.
- Led the migration from legacy technologies: Subversion to Git and Ant to Maven.
- Provided support to colleagues together with the DevOps team.
- Mentored and coached interns and other staff members.
Software Development Engineer in Test
Audicon
- Developed a test manager and runner for black box API testing and raised code coverage to 80%.
- Implemented a flexible data generator for testing.
- 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.
Experience
LinkedIn Scraping Bot
https://github.com/mihaiplesa/linkedin-scraping-bot-pythonIt logs in an account, finds and visits profiles based on keywords, and extracts data from them.
I led the design and implementation.
Instagram Bot
https://github.com/mihaiplesa/instagram-bot-pythonIt logs into an account, finds and visits profiles based on hashtags, follows them, and likes their photos.
I led the design and implementation.
AWS ECS Fargate Sample Architecture with Terraform
https://github.com/mihaiplesa/terraform-aws-ecs-fargateI led the architecture, design, and implementation.
Skills
Languages
Bash, Python, Gherkin, Python 2, Python 3, Bash Script, JavaScript, Java, Groovy, Ruby, HTML, Java 8, VBScript, C#, Perl, PHP, CSS, Go, C++, C
Frameworks
Angular, Selenium, Ant Design, 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, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon EBS, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon 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, Apache Maven, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Kibana, Grafana, Make, Pytest, Zabbix, RPM, Microsoft Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Sentry, Vagrant, Packer, Gradle, Travis CI, Amazon EKS, AWS CloudFormation, MongoDB Atlas, Google Compute Engine (GCE), IDEA IDE, AWS CloudTrail, Hudson, Visual Studio, Hyper-V, MSBuild, TFS, SaltStack, ActiveMQ, Apache JMeter, Solr, Vault, Apache ZooKeeper, 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, Amazon 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), Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Windows Server, Citrix, Nexus, OpenShift, Kali Linux, Kubernetes
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon EFS, Datadog, Google Cloud, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Memcached, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Elastic File System, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Active Directory, Hazelcast, KairosDB, Cassandra, Couchbase, CouchDB, RethinkDB, Amazon Aurora
Other
Lambda Functions, AWS CodePipeline, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Shell Scripting, Serverless, System Administration, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified Solution Architect, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, Cloud, AWS DevOps, IT Infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines, RHEL, Consul, SSL, HTTPS, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Graphite, Netflix OSS, Oracle VM VirtualBox, HAProxy, Ubuntu Server, IIS, Cloudflare, Chromium, Browsers, APM, Scraping, Large-scale Web Crawlers, Web Crawlers, Web Scraping, Groovy Scripting, Enterprise, Amazon Kinesis, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Amazon Route 53, Chatbots, HTTPD, Microsoft Office SDK, VMware ESXi, Micrometer, LDAP, Apache Cassandra, Octopus Deploy
Education
Master of Science in Computer Networks and Distributed Systems
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Certifications
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
AWS
AWS Certified Developer
AWS
AWS Certified Solutions Architect
AWS
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
AWS
Online Marketing Academy Graduate
Microsoft Data Platform Competency (Sales, Marketing, Licensing)
Microsoft
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