Karim C.

Architected and provisioned end-to-end AWS infrastructure using Terraform, including VPC networking, EKS clusters, RDS databases, and S3 storage. Integrated Argo CD into the existing CI/CD pipeline in close collaboration with the development team, enabling GitOps-driven deployments and improved release reliability. Led recurring production incident investigations, performing deep root-cause analysis to quickly restore service and prevent regressions. Provisioned and configured a secure EC2 bastion host with Ansible to enable controlled access to databases hosted in private subnets. Partnered with the tech lead to successfully migrate the application from EKS to a serverless architecture (API Gateway, Lambda, S3, CloudFront, and Cognito), significantly reducing infrastructure costs. Implemented real-time monitoring and alerting using CloudWatch alarms, with an event-driven notification pipeline built on EventBridge and SNS. Automated AMI creation using Packer, providing standardized, reusable images for development and deployment workflows. Collaborated with backend engineers to secure API Gateway endpoints using Cognito authorizers, strengthening authentication and access control. Improved Lambda performance and observability by leveraging CloudWatch Lambda Insights, identifying and resolving bottlenecks. Deployed and exposed the frontend application on S3 behind a CloudFront distribution, maximizing performance, scalability, and global availability. Developed automation scripts with Boto3 to eliminate repetitive operational tasks and increase team efficiency. Managed DNS and SSL/TLS lifecycle using Route 53 and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), ensuring secure and reliable traffic routing.

Introduced Docker and Docker Compose to containerize both backend and frontend applications, standardizing local development and deployment workflows. Led the migration of the API layer from DigitalOcean to AWS using Terraform, deploying services on ECS Fargate with RDS across multiple Availability Zones to achieve high availability and resilience. Implemented Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to improve application performance and scalability through efficient data caching. Established AWS Organizations to manage isolated development, staging, and production accounts, improving security, governance, and cost visibility. Configured auto scaling for ECS Fargate services to dynamically adjust capacity and optimize infrastructure costs during periods of low traffic. Implemented comprehensive monitoring for ECS workloads using CloudWatch Container Insights, improving visibility into container and service health. Built event-driven alerting and notification pipelines using EventBridge, CloudWatch Logs, and SNS to enable rapid incident response. Designed and implemented a secure CI/CD pipeline using GitLab CI/CD and IAM, enabling consistent, automated, and least-privilege deployments. Bootstrapped and provisioned development EC2 instances using Terraform and Ansible, ensuring repeatable and environment-agnostic setups. Implemented application and infrastructure health checks to continuously validate cluster and service availability. Enforced AWS security best practices for a three-tier architecture, placing API and database layers in private subnets behind an Application Load Balancer in public subnets. Actively evangelized AWS and DevOps best practices across frontend and backend teams, helping engineers adopt cloud-native patterns and work more efficiently in a shared AWS environment.

Designed and developed high-performance, scalable REST APIs using Python (Flask, Django) and Node.js (Express) to support mission-critical business systems. Owned the entire backend lifecycle, from API design and domain modeling through development, automated testing, deployment, and ongoing production support in highly available environments. Applied REST best practices including resource modeling, HTTP semantics, versioning strategies, pagination, and idempotency to deliver clean, intuitive, and consumer-focused APIs. Built robust and efficient data access layers using Sequelize, SQLAlchemy/Django ORM, sqlx, and GORM, with a strong emphasis on performance, consistency, and data integrity. Delivered full-stack features using React.js, integrating closely with backend APIs and handling complex state management, error handling, and asynchronous workflows. Established comprehensive automated testing strategies using pytest, unittest, Jest, Supertest, testing, and testify, covering unit, integration, and contract-level tests. Built, optimized, and secured Docker images using multi-stage builds and minimal base images, and integrated containerized services into CI/CD pipelines for reliable, repeatable deployments.