Wahaj Akmal

Lead DevOps Engineer (Contract)

Real Life Sciences • Full time

Aug 2023 - Jul 2025 • 1 yr 11 mos

▸ Deployed NLP workloads on AWS ECS using Bitbucket Pipelines with automated build, test, and release workflows. ▸ Remediated Security Hub and Inspector findings to harden infrastructure and pass penetration testing. ▸ Managed AWS infrastructure with Terraform and enabled multi-region deployments using branching and promotion strategies. ▸ Improved reliability by standardizing IaC, container orchestration practices, and security guardrails.

Senior DevOps Engineer (Contract)

Winthrope Intelligence • Full time

May 2024 - Jun 2025 • 1 yr 1 mo

▸ Migrated Linode infrastructure to Terraform for full IaC management, reviewable changes, and repeatable environments. ▸ Designed and implemented disaster recovery (DR) for critical services and documented recovery procedures. ▸ Transitioned Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) workloads to Argo CD for GitOps-based deployments. ▸ Implemented PR-based ephemeral environments to streamline developer testing and improve CI feedback loops. ▸ Automated AWS provisioning with Terraform, managing ~150 resources per deployment and reducing environment spin-up time by ~80%. ▸ Built Kubernetes remediation playbooks for runaway processes and cluster-IP exhaustion, reducing stability incidents from weekly to near-zero. ▸ Diagnosed and resolved production AWS issues (EC2, ALB, RDS, IAM), restoring services within <30 minutes for critical incidents. ▸ Partnered with enterprise stakeholders (Apple & eBay) to meet security and compliance expectations.

Senior DevOps Engineer (Contract)

Acquia • Full time

Aug 2023 - Jan 2025 • 1 yr 5 mos

▸ Built and maintained FedRAMP-compliant AWS infrastructure controls; used Orca Security to identify vulnerabilities/misconfigurations and drove remediation across IAM, networking, and Kubernetes. ▸ Automated multi-account/multi-region AWS infrastructure using Terraform/Terragrunt and standardized secure baselines. ▸ Operated EKS clusters with centralized observability (Prometheus, Grafana, AWS AMP) and improved alerting/runbooks. ▸ Enforced Kubernetes security with Kyverno policies and exception workflows to balance compliance and delivery speed. ▸ Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins, Argo CD, and GitHub Actions; integrated security checks and vulnerability tracking. ▸ Optimized AWS Macie usage for cost-effective S3 classification and operationalized findings workflows.