As a Security Automation Engineer at Grammarly, my expertise lies in creating and integrating security automation tools to boost the security posture throughout the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring proactive threat detection and rapid response. In my previous role as a Technical Lead Manager, I drove substantial improvements in developer productivity, community engagement, and CI/CD enhancements.
My leadership in strategic projects and operational improvements has consistently strengthened the company’s infrastructure and team efficiency. My expertise in automation and leadership drives my commitment to robust, scalable security solutions and continuous professional development.
Professional Experience
I develop and implement security automation tools and frameworks for reproducible security operations, automated reasoning, and remediation, such as:
- Supply Chain Security: Integrate security measures within the CI/CD stack to ensure the delivery and deployment of trusted artifacts. Shifting left the security while maintaining a high level of developer productivity and experience.
- Threat Detection and Response: Automate the processes for detecting and responding to security threats.
Key Accomplishments:
Developer Productivity: Led the integration and adoption of advanced coding tools, enhancing engineering org efficiency and knowledge sharing. Facilitated webinars to promote widespread tool usage.
Community Engagement: Organized and managed engineering meetups, delivered presentations on infrastructure management, and led educational initiatives. I also actively participated in technical meetups on Kubernetes and Platform education, enriching the tech community dialogue and company branding.
CI/CD Enhancements: Enhanced the desktop applications supply chain by implementing the HSM appliance. Implemented multi-architecture support for CI infrastructure, significantly optimizing build and deployment processes.
Strategic Projects: Led regulatory compliance research to improve the security posture of the CI/CD stack. I also led infrastructure planning for a critical company-wide project, ensuring robust and scalable implementations.
Operational Improvements: Launched a project to address the team’s technical debt, boosting its technical excellence. Modernized the on-call process for better efficiency and response times. Coordinated major on-site events to enhance team collaboration and alignment.
I have improved our CI/CD infrastructure and supported the professional growth of our engineering teams.Key Accomplishments:
CI/CD Improvements: I developed the new version of the macOS CI infrastructure, which included self-service horizontal scaling and multi-architecture support. This update reduced the iOS team’s CI processing times by about 40% and similarly lowered costs. I also updated our Linux-based CI infrastructure to use Kubernetes, which cut infrastructure costs by four times, reduced maintenance needs, and improved scalability.
Educational Initiatives and Team Engagement: I created ‘Platform University,’ a comprehensive learning program with tutorials and video lectures to enhance engineers’ proficiency with our tools. Additionally, I led a HackWeek project that developed a quest game, improving the onboarding experience for new engineers and promoting a deeper understanding of our Engineering Platform.
Mentorship: I provided guidance and support to team members transitioning to the Engineering Platform team, focusing on their professional development and successful integration into our processes.
Code Quality Initiatives: I led the adoption of SonarQube to unify the developer experience around code style checks, test coverage, and bug detection.
Infrastructure and Accessibility Improvements: I developed Terraform modules that streamlined infrastructure management for static websites and single-page applications. I also conducted research to identify and address pain points in engineers’ interactions with our platform, leading to targeted improvements that enhanced user experience and accessibility.
Notable Projects: macOS-based CI/CD, Platform University, GitLab CI Infrastructure on K8s
As a DevOps Coach, I delivered comprehensive training to a diverse group of participants. My classes focused on demystifying the principles of DevOps and providing practical insights into its implementation across various industries. I instructed participants on effectively integrating and collaborating within development teams, utilizing key DevOps tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, and Docker.
My teaching emphasized the technical skills and the DevOps mindset, encouraging proactive problem-solving and continuous improvement practices. This role was mutually beneficial; it allowed me to realize my aspiration of teaching while providing valuable career advancement opportunities for my students, many of whom secured new employment or promotions as a result of the training. My experience as a DevOps Coach honed my instructional abilities and deepened my understanding of how DevOps principles can be adapted and applied in different organizational contexts.
I managed a dynamic and dedicated team of engineers. Our efforts were centered on delivering high-quality outcomes and enhancing the operational framework within which we worked.
Key Accomplishments:
Team Development: I grew the team from 1 to 8 engineers, completing over 40 projects successfully. I addressed the challenge of fostering a culture of ownership, transforming team members’ mindsets to enhance personal responsibility and accountability.
Interdepartmental Collaboration: Boosted the department’s reputation and visibility, tripling the number of projects shared with other departments. Maintained high team motivation and engagement during peaks and drawdowns of workload, ensuring consistent performance and collaboration.
Innovative Business Modeling: Introduced ‘DevOps as a Service’ within our department, revolutionizing our business approach and optimizing project delivery. This initiative also involved articulating and justifying the team’s advantages to potential clients during pre-sales, enhancing client understanding and satisfaction.
Mentorship and Leadership: Mentored junior newcomers into capable senior and middle engineers, emphasizing continuous professional growth and development. This mentorship also played a key role in maintaining team motivation and cohesion through varying project demands and workloads.
I was responsible for the technical side of processes inside the department and researching the new technologies we could implement for our clients.
Introduced ITIL practices with our COO and, what I like the most, could change how our sysadmin’s department worked with the development department. As a result, the work became more coordinated and more integrated.
Key accomplishments
- Improved technical expertise of a support team;
- Improved task management;
- Increased team size;
- Fostered the change of team mindset to Agile thinking.
Started my career in IT: grew up from a Level-1 tech support engineer (communication with customers and initial problem analysis) to Level-3 System Administrator responsible for complex technical tasks and daily shift management.
Skills
- 🤝 Team Leader
- Achieve engineering-wide goals through extensive guidance, helping engineers achieve success via coaching, engaging talks, and advocating for rising the bar. My approach prioritizes impactful results, carefully balancing team priorities with a keen understanding of cost versus customer benefits.
- 📈 PM
- Proficient in autonomously managing and forecasting large-scale project tasks, with a track record of influencing engineering goals. Expert in designing new systems from scratch and providing pivotal design feedback to peers. Skilled in leading critical projects and systems.
- ☁️ Clouds
- Amazon Web Services. Design and fine-tuning of resilient, cost-effective, and highly-available infrastructures.
- ⚙️ Techs
- GitlabCI, Github Actions, Terraform, Docker, Ansible, GoLang, Kubernetes.
- 🇬🇧 English
- C2 (CEFR)
- 🇩🇪 Deutsch
- A1 (CEFR)
Activities and interests
- Travel
- I like to explore new cities and countries, and I like trekking and hiking. I’ve been to the Annapurna base camp, and now I want to visit Everest’s base camp.
- Blogging
- I love to write tutorials and articles about the technologies I use and learn. I actively participate in technical communities as an AWS Community Builder and HashiCorp Ambassador.
- Science
- Fond of History, Astronomy, and Physics. I wish to see the Betelgeuse supernova explosion someday, even though the expected explosion date is somewhere between today and 100k years.