Atif Ali
Senior Platform Engineer
10+ years designing and operating production-grade cloud infrastructure across AWS, Kubernetes, and bare-metal environments. A background in network engineering provides infrastructure depth (from BGP routing to eBPF-based observability) that most cloud-native engineers cannot match. Focused on building secure, scalable, and production-ready cloud platforms that enable engineering teams to ship software faster and operate reliably at scale.
Expertise
Platform Engineering Expertise
Deep specialization across cloud-native, hybrid, bare-metal, and network infrastructure
Cloud Platforms
Production workloads across AWS, GCP, Azure, and bare-metal providers. Primary expertise in AWS with real multi-cloud and hybrid architecture experience.
Kubernetes & Platform Engineering
End-to-end Kubernetes operations from bare-metal kubeadm to managed EKS. GitOps workflows, cluster lifecycle, and platform automation at scale.
CI/CD & DevSecOps
Automated delivery pipelines with security scanning integrated at every stage. Zero-downtime deployments and full audit trails.
Infrastructure as Code
Modular Terraform codebases your team owns and understands. Pulumi, Ansible, and CloudFormation for multi-cloud IaC needs.
Observability & SRE
Full observability stacks with properly tuned alerting. Error budgets, SLOs, and on-call runbooks that eliminate alert fatigue and keep teams sane.
Networking & Security
Network engineering background applied to cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure. VPC design, BGP routing, service mesh, VPN, and zero-trust security architecture.
Current Focus
Currently Exploring
Engineering Work
Selected Engineering Work
Production-scale platform engineering initiatives with documented outcomes
AWS Infrastructure Cost Optimization
A 40-engineer product org burning $40K/month on AWS with no visibility into waste. EC2 instances consistently over-provisioned, idle resources never cleaned up, no tagging strategy to track costs by team or service.
Implemented Karpenter for intelligent demand-driven node provisioning, replacing static node groups entirely. Rightsized all RDS instances using CloudWatch metrics. Cleaned up 40+ unused Elastic IPs and enforced AWS Config tagging policy across all accounts.
Monthly AWS spend dropped from $40K to $12K within 8 weeks, a 70% reduction. Karpenter alone accounted for $18K/month in savings. Cost visibility established across all teams for the first time.
CI/CD Platform Overhaul
A 20-service platform with no automated delivery pipeline. Every production deployment was a high-stress, error-prone event consuming 3 to 4 hours of senior engineering time via manual SSH scripts.
Designed GitLab CI/CD pipelines with per-service pipelines sharing common CI templates. Each pipeline included automated testing, Docker builds with layer caching, staging deployments with smoke tests, and automated rollback on health check failure.
Deployment time dropped from 4 hours to 15 minutes, a 94% reduction. The platform moved from weekly releases to multiple deployments per day. Feature velocity increased 3x within the first sprint.
Multi-AZ EKS Platform Migration
A product engineering team operating a single-region EKS cluster that had experienced three significant outages in six months, each lasting 45 to 90 minutes. No pod disruption budgets, no HPA, and alerting with so many false positives the team had stopped responding to pages.
Designed multi-AZ EKS architecture with node groups spread across three availability zones and pod anti-affinity rules enforced at the platform level. Rebuilt the observability stack using Prometheus and Grafana with properly tuned alerting thresholds, reducing alert volume by 85%.
Zero downtime incidents in 12 months. Alert fatigue eliminated. The platform successfully passed an external security audit requiring demonstrated uptime SLA evidence.
Details anonymised to protect prior employers. Metrics are verified and unexaggerated.
Credentials
Certifications
Active industry certifications, verified and current
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional
Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
Amazon Web Services
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
HashiCorp
GitLab Certified CI/CD Specialist
GitLab
CompTIA Network+
CompTIA
Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP)
Microsoft
Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE)
Microsoft
Get In Touch
Let's Connect
Open to Senior Platform Engineer and Cloud Infrastructure roles at engineering-led companies. Remote-first, available globally.
Availability
Remote-first · Open to relocation
North American and MENA timezones
Response within 24 hours.
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