Espoo, Finland · via DoTech Oy

Babak Doraniarab

Platform Engineer.

Senior Platform Engineer & DevOps Architect with 18 years building and running production platforms on Kubernetes — securely, at scale. Now bringing that to teams as an independent.

Available for remote contract — from October 2026
0
Years
K8s
EKS + self-managed
Vault
Enterprise
FinTech
Regulated scale

// About

I build the infrastructure that lets engineering teams ship fast and sleep at night.

Most recently I owned the platform end-to-end at Jaja Finance, a UK FinTech — Kubernetes, the full Kong API Gateway lifecycle, HashiCorp Vault Enterprise for secrets and identity, and GitOps delivery with Argo CD. I work fully remote across European and UK time zones, and I contract through my own company, DoTech Oy. I care about reliability, doing security properly, and platforms that developers actually enjoy using.

// Expertise

Where I add the most value

Proven, production, interview-defensible.

Kubernetes & Platform

EKS + self-managed clusters, full lifecycle & upgrades, Helm, ingress, internal developer platforms.

API Gateway

Deep Kong expertise — production migrations (1.5 → 3.4), plugin development, full lifecycle.

Secrets & Security

HashiCorp Vault Enterprise, Consul, Keycloak, privileged access management.

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform (HashiCorp Certified), CDKTF, Ansible, Puppet.

Cloud & FinOps

AWS — EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, MSK/Kafka, Bedrock — with cost optimisation.

CI/CD & GitOps

Argo CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins — progressive delivery and clean pipelines.

Observability

Datadog, ELK — metrics, logs, alerting and SLOs.

AI / LLM Infrastructure

RAG pipelines (LiteLLM, ChromaDB), AWS Bedrock & self-hosted chatbots, a custom MCP server and TUI tooling for infrastructure diagnostics.

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Programming

Python (primary), Go, Bash, JavaScript/Node.js.

Networking

CCNP-level — BGP, HAProxy, DNS, firewalling.

// Selected results

Impact at Jaja Finance

UK FinTech · Senior Platform Engineer · 2022–present

Kong 1.5 → 3.4
~25M requests / day

Sole owner of the API gateway carrying all production API traffic for a UK bank — routing, plugin development, and a multi-major-version migration executed with minimal service disruption.

AWS spend −30%
$2.0M → $1.4M / year

FinOps across EKS + self-managed (Kubernetes 1.21 → 1.35), Terraform-provisioned AWS, Argo CD GitOps and Datadog — cutting annual cloud spend by roughly a third.

Vault Enterprise 1.10 → 1.19
Regulated workloads

Ran secrets, identity and service discovery (Vault, Consul, Keycloak) for a regulated FinTech; executed enterprise upgrades while keeping authentication and access control highly available.

// 18 years, in brief

2022–present Senior Platform Engineer — Jaja Finance UK FinTech · fully remote
2022 Senior DevOps Consultant — Eficode Helsinki
2016–2022 Freelance DevOps & Platform Engineer Kubernetes · AWS · CI/CD · full-stack
2007–2016 Senior Network / VoIP Engineer & CCNA/CCNP Instructor enterprise Cisco · Asterisk · 900+ students trained

// Projects

Things I build

FreeZenith

Open-sourcing soon

Self-hostable Internal Developer Platform

A full internal developer platform you run on your own infrastructure — Hetzner or fully on-premises — so startups and mid-sized teams get a real IDP for free.

KubernetesBackstageArgo CDCiliumKyvernoFalcoKEDAVeleroVictoriaMetrics
Visit freezenith.com →

NexGate

In production

Privileged Access Management

A PAM platform that controls, records and audits privileged access to servers — RDP, SSH, databases, Kubernetes. In production at a bank. Co-architected by me with the DoTech team.

KubernetesCiliumKyvernoFalcoKEDAArgo CDVeleroBackstageHashiCorp ConsulAWSVMware ESXi

AI Infrastructure & Tooling

Applied AI

MCP · RAG · Bedrock

A custom MCP server and a TUI application for diagnosing infrastructure problems; RAG chatbots on AWS Bedrock and self-hosted (LiteLLM + ChromaDB). Bridging platform engineering and applied AI.

Babak Academy

Community

Free DevOps & Platform Engineering community

A free, hands-on community for DevOps and platform engineering that I founded — real sandbox terminals (Linux, Kubernetes, Docker) and practical scenarios for a growing community of engineers.

Visit babakacademy.com →

DoTech Oy

Consultancy

Consultancy · products · open source

My Finnish consultancy — independent client work funds a lean team building B2B platform and security products, plus open-source tools for the community (FreeZenith, Babak Academy).

// Contact

Let's talk.

Available for remote contract engagements from October 2026 — and open to the right permanent remote role. Based in Finland, working across EU & UK time zones.