Alexandra Chen

Lead platform engineering for real-time data streaming products serving 500K+ daily active users. Architect multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure on AWS and GCP. Own CI/CD pipeline strategy, SLO definitions, and incident response protocols. Mentor team of four DevOps engineers and drive infrastructure cost optimization initiatives.

Global Streaming Platform Resilience

• Rearchitected monolithic deployment pipeline into microservices-based GitOps workflow for a high-throughput streaming data platform processing 2M events per second. Replaced manual deployment processes with fully automated ArgoCD-based continuous delivery.
• AWS EKS across us-east-1 and eu-west-1, ArgoCD for GitOps, Terraform for IaC, Prometheus/Grafana for observability, Flux for secret management, custom admission controllers for policy enforcement
• Led infrastructure redesign from concept to production. Defined SLOs and error budgets. Built custom operators for canary analysis. Established disaster recovery procedures with automated failover.
• Tech Stack: Kubernetes ArgoCD Terraform Prometheus AWS EKS GitOps
• Challenges: 99.99% Availability Achievement: Reduced critical incidents by 73% through automated canary deployments and real-time rollback capabilities based on custom latency and error-rate metrics.
• Challenges: Deployment Velocity: Decreased mean lead time for changes from 14 days to 45 minutes through pipeline parallelization and artifact promotion strategies.
• Challenges: Cost Optimization: Reduced cloud infrastructure spend by $2.3M annually through rightsizing, spot instance adoption, and automated resource scheduling.
• Challenges: AI-Assisted Incident Response: Integrated Claude Code for automated log analysis and root-cause hypothesis generation during incidents, reducing MTTR from 90 minutes to 22 minutes.

Compliance Automation Framework

• Built automated compliance validation pipeline for SOC2 and GDPR requirements across 15 microservices. Integrated policy-as-code with human-in-the-loop approval gates.
• Open Policy Agent, Kyverno, Tekton, Vault, custom webhook services
• Designed policy framework and validation pipeline. Integrated with existing CI/CD. Built self-service compliance dashboard for engineering teams.
• Tech Stack: Open Policy Agent Kyverno HashiCorp Vault Tekton Policy as Code
• Challenges: Audit Readiness: Reduced compliance audit preparation from 6 weeks to 3 days through continuous automated evidence collection.

Maintained and improved CI/CD infrastructure for analytics platform team. Supported migration from on-premises data centers to AWS. Automated routine operational tasks and contributed to monitoring and alerting improvements.

AWS Migration and Containerization

• Migrated 12 legacy applications from VM-based deployment to Docker containers on Amazon ECS. Established initial CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation practices.
• Amazon ECS, Docker, Jenkins, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, AWS CodeCommit
• Executed containerization of legacy applications. Built CloudFormation templates. Configured CloudWatch dashboards and alarms. Documented operational runbooks.
• Tech Stack: Amazon ECS Docker Jenkins CloudFormation AWS
• Challenges: Migration Completion: Completed migration 3 weeks ahead of schedule with zero data loss incidents.
• Challenges: Operational Efficiency: Reduced environment provisioning time from 3 days to 30 minutes through infrastructure automation.

Monitoring and Alerting Standardization

• Unified fragmented monitoring tools into cohesive observability stack with actionable alerting.
• Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, custom exporters
• Standardized metric collection. Configured alert routing and escalation. Built team-specific dashboards.
• Tech Stack: Prometheus Grafana PagerDuty Observability
• Challenges: Alert Fatigue Reduction: Reduced false-positive alerts by 68% through alert tuning and dependency-aware suppression rules.