Open to CTO & VP Engineering opportunities

Building infrastructure
that scales businesses

Director-level engineering leader with 15+ years transforming how fintech companies build, deploy, and scale. From seed stage to Series B — I architect the platforms, developer experience, and AI-augmented workflows that power growth.

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Engineering leader who builds
from the ground up

I'm a hands-on engineering leader who has spent the last 15 years at the intersection of infrastructure, security, developer experience, and business growth. I don't just keep systems running — I build the platforms, golden paths, and AI-augmented toolchains that let companies move faster, hire better, and scale with confidence.

At Lean Technologies, I joined at seed stage and scaled infrastructure through a $33M Series A (Sequoia) and $67.5M Series B (General Catalyst), achieving SAMA fintech licensing in Saudi Arabia — a pioneering regulatory milestone. I designed and executed multi-cloud BCP/DR strategies across OCI, GCP, and AWS with RPO=0 and RTO≤2h, implemented FinOps governance cutting spend by 50%, and built CIS-hardened Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. Before that, I architected solutions at JPMorgan Chase (presented at AWS re:Invent), saved $500K at DREST through strategic re-architecture, and reduced costs by 40% at Burberry.

I lead distributed teams across multiple regions, leverage AI and automation to eliminate toil, negotiate multi-million dollar cloud contracts, and bridge the gap between engineering execution and executive strategy. Based in London/Dubai, operating globally.

🏗️
Seed → Series B Builder
Scaled infrastructure through two major funding rounds at a regulated MENA fintech
🔒
Compliance & CIS Hardening
Led SAMA, CBUAE, ISO 27001, CIS Benchmarks across UAE and KSA markets
🛡️
BCP & Disaster Recovery
Designed multi-cloud DR with RPO=0, RTO≤2h across OCI, GCP, and AWS regions
🧑‍💻
Developer Experience
Golden paths, self-service platforms, and DORA Elite metrics — devs ship, not wait
💰
FinOps & Cost Governance
50% infra cost reduction through systematic optimization and cloud contract negotiation
🤖
AI-Augmented Operations
Leveraging AI/ML for intelligent automation, observability, and engineering productivity
illia@infra ~ %
$ whoami
illia.shpak — Head of DevOps & SRE
$ cat /etc/career/focus
platform-engineering · devex · security · finops · bcp/dr · ai-ops
$ uptime
15 years, zero unplanned career downtime
$ kubectl get pods --namespace=expertise
aws ✓ gcp ✓ oci ✓ k8s ✓ terraform ✓ finops ✓ cis ✓ ai ✓
$ cat /var/log/dr-status.log
multi-cloud BCP active — RPO=0 RTO≤2h — all regions healthy
Numbers that matter
Measurable outcomes from building platforms that drive revenue, reduce cost, and enable growth.
50%
Infrastructure cost
reduction at Lean
$500K
Saved through
re-architecture at DREST
Team capacity increase
via automation
250+
Clients served
incl. Binance, Tabby
Where I've built
A progression from hands-on engineering to strategic leadership across fintech, fashion, banking, and travel.
2022 — Present
Head of DevOps & SRE
Lean Technologies — London / Dubai / Riyadh
Leading fintech infrastructure platform in MENA (250+ clients, $2B+ processed). Scaled team from 2→8 across four regions. Achieved SAMA fintech license, CIS-hardened all infrastructure, and DORA Elite metrics. Designed multi-cloud BCP/DR (RPO=0, RTO≤2h) across OCI, GCP, and AWS. Implemented FinOps governance cutting spend by 50%. Built golden paths and developer self-service platforms. Leveraging AI to accelerate engineering workflows.
Kubernetes Terraform GCP OCI SAMA CIS BCP/DR FinOps ArgoCD Vault
2021 — 2022
VP Cloud / Systems Architect
JPMorgan Chase — London
Contributed to architecture for a global digital call center platform. Built real-time data integration microservices, WebRTC quality metrics pipelines, and intelligent call routing. Solution presented at AWS re:Invent 2022 as reference architecture.
AWS Python Kafka Spinnaker Kinesis Terraform
2019 — 2021
Head of DevOps & Security
DREST — London
Reported to CEO/CTO. Saved $500K by identifying inefficiencies and leading a full stack migration. Transformed deployments from weekly to multiple per hour. Implemented AWS Well-Architected Framework across all five pillars.
AWS EKS CircleCI Neptune GraphQL GDPR
2017 — 2019
Lead DevOps Engineer
Burberry (via EPAM) — London
Reduced infrastructure costs by 40%. Managed GitLab for 150+ engineers. Led AWS hardening achieving full remediation in 3 weeks vs. 2 months planned. Enterprise-scale ELK, Akamai CDN, and Kubernetes orchestration.
AWS Chef ELK Kubernetes Akamai
2011 — 2017
Senior DevOps / SRE Engineer
Thomas Cook (via EPAM) — Minsk / London
Led team of 12 engineers. Migrated EU data centers (400+ instances) with minimal downtime. Deployed monitoring for 500+ instances. Performance testing, database optimization, and automation at enterprise scale.
Linux Puppet Chef Oracle MySQL Zabbix
What I bring to the table
Deep expertise across the full spectrum of modern infrastructure, security, and engineering leadership.
☁️
Multi-Cloud Architecture
Designing and operating hybrid infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and OCI with zero-downtime migrations and cross-cloud failover.
AWSGCPOCITerraformCloudFormation
🛡️
BCP & Disaster Recovery
Planning and executing multi-cloud business continuity strategies with RPO=0, RTO≤2h. Validated failover across regions with automated runbooks.
DR PlanningCross-Cloud ReplicationFailover TestingBCM
🔐
Security & CIS Compliance
Built Zero-Trust network architecture and PAM from scratch. Stood up SOC/SIEM capability for 24/7 threat monitoring. CIS Benchmarks Level 1 hardening across Kubernetes, VMs, and databases. Regulatory compliance across SAMA, CBUAE, GDPR, NIST.
Zero-TrustPAMVaultTeleportTwingateSIEMSOCWizSnykCIS
🧑‍💻
Developer Experience
Golden paths, self-service platforms, internal developer portals, and removing friction so engineers ship features — not fight infrastructure.
Golden PathsIDPSelf-ServiceDORA Metrics
Kubernetes & Platform
Production Kubernetes across GKE, EKS, OKE. GitOps with ArgoCD, container orchestration at scale, and platform-as-a-product mindset.
GKEEKSOKEArgoCDHelmDocker
💰
FinOps & Cost Governance
Systematic cloud cost optimization, vendor contract negotiation, rightsizing, and FinOps governance — delivering 40–50% savings at scale.
FinOpsCost OptimizationVendor MgmtRightsizing
🤖
AI-Augmented Engineering
Applying AI/ML to infrastructure operations — intelligent automation, AI-assisted observability, LLM-powered toolchains, and engineering productivity.
LLM OpsAI AutomationML PipelinesClaude / GPT
📊
Observability & SRE
Full-stack monitoring, SLO/SLI frameworks, incident management, and on-call processes achieving 99.99% platform uptime.
PrometheusGrafanaELKOpenTelemetryAPM
👥
Engineering Leadership
Scaling distributed teams, defining OKRs, 200+ technical interviews, C-suite collaboration, and building engineering culture from scratch.
Team BuildingOKR/KPIHiringStrategy
Credentials
🏅 AWS Solutions Architect — Associate
🏅 GCP Professional Cloud Architect
🏅 Google Project Management Professional
🏅 Y Combinator Startup School
🏅 SRE: Measuring & Managing Reliability
🏅 Chef Certified Developer
🏅 ELK Machine Learning
Building beyond the day job
Marketplace · B2B
DzeTruck
"Uber for Construction" — a B2B logistics marketplace connecting contractors with transport providers. Serverless architecture with Firebase, React, Flutter, and automated CI/CD to App Store and Google Play. Acquired paying B2B clients.
landing.dzetruck.com →
AI / ML · SaaS
Menu Scanner
AI-powered dietary analysis using Computer Vision and NLP. Serverless on GCP Cloud Run with global edge distribution via Vercel. Built with Next.js and Google Cloud Vision APIs.
menu-scanner.com →
Testimonial
Illia is an extraordinary asset for a team. He is beyond dedicated, completely on top of his responsibilities and knows his tech stack to the extreme.
Lisa Bridgett, CEO at Operational & Investments Boards, DREST
Let's build something
Currently open to CTO, VP Engineering, and Head of Platform opportunities. Based in Dubai, operating globally. Reach out via LinkedIn.