Consulting
I help companies build application platforms that enable them to ship quickly and safely.
Much of my recent work has been with Kubernetes + AWS, but I also have experience with GCP, and deploying to airgapped on-prem networks.
Interested in taking your DevOps to the next level? Reach out to sid@devopsdirective.com!
Some Previous Engagements:
Nominal
Sid created the foundation for our infrastructure, setting up continuous deployment using best practices and state of the art open source tools, working with us 2023-2025 as we grew from 6 to 50 engineers. Even in the very early days of our engineering organization, developers had the leverage of master-crafted foundational tools and automation, something that we’ve seen larger and mature organizations take teams of people to do. We gave him the nickname of “Gandalf” because he so frequently made magic happen. Although he might be too humble to admit it, I suspect some of his work would still be crucial even if we hired 10x as many engineers.
Despite only working part time, Sid was a clear owner when it came to devops and infrastructure; he was always incredibly responsive to any questions from developers and very often jumped in to help with incident response, even if unrelated to his domain.
Sid is also an excellent teacher. He is passionate about spreading his knowledge in a scalable and repeatable way. He left a wake of fantastic documentation for everything he did.
Sid very often sought and incorporated feedback from developers so that he was always pointed on the most important infrastructure and devops issues. He was also an essential thought partner for developers for when we had new expansion opportunities such as deploying on premises or in customer clouds.
Jason Hoch, Co-founder
Gauntlet Networks
Sid started working with Gauntlet in April 2020 when the company was less than 10 people. We had a basic Kubernetes cluster set up to handle some manually triggered simulation jobs, and brought Sid on board to help take our DevOps and infrastructure to the next level. Over the following two years, Sid led a number of significant projects including:
- Rolling out and upgrading Kubeflow for better management and automation of ETL, simulation, and optimization workflows on Kubernetes
- Leveraging cluster autoscaling and pre-emptible instances to efficiently serve bursty workloads at scale
- Designing and implementing a CI/CD workflow that fit the needs of our organization, including setting up IaaS via Terraform, cluster deployment and maintenance across multiple development environments, as well as observability and monitoring solutions
Sid was able to independently own most of these projects over their entire lifecycle as a part-time contractor, while still collaborating effectively with others on the team to navigate complex and changing business requirements. Sid is always meticulous about code quality, documentation, and knowledge sharing, which resulted in a smooth transition at the end of the project. Much of Gauntlet’s infrastructure continues to rely on Sid’s work, which now supports a team of 50, running hundreds of daily jobs with tricky compute requirements and dependency management. I would recommend working with Sid in a heartbeat for any similar projects."
Rei Chiang, Chief Technology Officer
Ursa Space Systems
Sid worked with Ursa Space Systems from November 2021 through December 2022. We hired Sid to support our Systems Team as a DevOps Consultant while we were expanding our DevOps team. His impact on our operations cannot be overstated! Sid delivered great value, even as a part-time employee.
His expertise with Kubernetes, AWS, and Gitlab CI is top-notch. He collaborated effectively with our development team and earned our highest trust as an external contractor. For all of these reasons, I would highly recommend Sid to any company looking for DevOps expertise."
Julie Baker, Chief Operating Officer