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Engineering Leader · Platform Architect

Platform architecture, developer experience, and the AI layer on top.

I lead the Developer Experience team at Unifonic and set platform direction for a multi-cloud Kubernetes estate across GCP, AWS, OCI, and Azure. Lately that includes building the AI layer: MCP servers that give assistants real project and cluster context, and AI-assisted review that holds quality steady as code volume grows.

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400+
Services on the platform I lead today
4h to 1h
Average issue resolution time, after rebuilding incident ownership
45%
Cloud spend reduction delivered
97%
Recurring infrastructure incidents eliminated
Case studies

Five pieces of work.

Each one covers the context, what I did, and the call I had to make.

Unifonic · Current

The AI layer on the platform

Most AI assistants are guessing about your systems. I built the servers that let them stop guessing: real context from Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and live Kubernetes clusters, plus AI-assisted review that keeps quality steady as code volume grows.

  • MCP servers exposing ticket history, documentation, cross-repo code context, and live cluster state.
  • AI-assisted pull request review across the team, with a Terraform server in progress.
View case study ↗
Unifonic · Current

Platform architecture at 400+ services

Multi-cloud Kubernetes from CI/CD through observability, security, and DR.

  • Chose Istio ambient over Cilium and sidecars through a structured PoC on OKE.
  • Kyverno policies push SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS controls into the clusters.
25% faster releases · 30% lower logging cost at 3TB+/day
View case study ↗
Unifonic · Developer experience

Building the DevEx function

Six engineers embedded two-to-a-squad instead of one central ticket queue.

  • Rebuilt incident ownership, runbooks, and escalation paths across 12 product squads.
  • Coached engineers who had struggled under previous management into solid performers.
Resolution time 4h to 1h · Top manager rating in upward feedback
View case study ↗
Small World Financial Services

Stalled program turnaround

A modernization program stalled 8+ months, delivered in 3 after the direction changed.

  • Proved the Docker Swarm direction wrong with a PoC and architecture diagrams.
  • Rebuilt on Kubernetes with OpenStack and RKE2, DR designed in from the start.
Team of 15 across six functions · Validated against failover SLAs
View case study ↗
Technogenics / StrikeReady

Building a department, and a platform

Grew DevOps from 3 engineers to 9 while revamping infrastructure for 500+ microservices.

  • Moved legacy infrastructure to a GCP and OCI hybrid model.
  • Supported SOC 2, ISO 27001, and Series A readiness through audit-ready controls.
45% cloud spend cut · 97% fewer recurring incidents
View case study ↗
Architecture

Three systems.

The AI layer is live, the OCI migration is delivered, and the golden path is the target state in build.

Live now
The MCP layer between assistants and the platform

An assistant that cannot see your tickets, your repositories, or your clusters is guessing. These servers give it the same context an engineer has, which is what makes its review output worth trusting.

AI assistants Editors, chat, CI MCP servers, built in-house Atlassian MCP Jira and Confluence context Bitbucket MCP Cross-repo code context Kubernetes MCP Live cluster state Terraform MCP In progress Jira, Confluence Tickets and documentation Bitbucket Repositories and pull requests EKS and OKE clusters Dev, preprod, production Terraform Infrastructure state AI-assisted pull request review runs on this context across 12 squads, with DevX skills feeding the assistant

Built in-house rather than bought, so the context layer matches how the team actually works.

Delivered
AWS to OCI migration and cutover

Saudi data-residency rules meant customer data had to stay in country. The migration was staged rather than a lift and shift, so registry resilience and multi-region continuity existed before anything cut over. Production now runs on OCI.

AWS (before) EKS clusters Karpenter node lifecycle ECR Container registry mirror staged cutover Saudi data residency boundary OCI (now) OKE clusters Istio ambient, Kyverno OCIR Registry resilience Multi-region Continuity, GCP DR next Backup, restore Cutover complete Argo CD GitOps, Terraform modules, and Vault ran across both sides throughout the migration

OCI was chosen over staying on AWS because residency ruled out the alternative, and because it came in at under half the cost while still being a full cloud.

Target state, Backstage underway
Golden path for a new service

The goal is that creating a service is one action, not a ticket and six follow-ups. A template scaffolds the repository with delivery, observability, security, and policy already wired in, and the catalog knows who owns it.

Developer Picks a template Backstage Scaffolder Scaffolded repository, wired in from the first commit CI/CD pipeline Observability Kyverno policy Helm manifests Service catalog Argo CD deploy Six DevEx engineers embedded two-to-a-squad own the templates, so the path stays current instead of rotting

Backstage is in build. The embedded team model that keeps these templates alive is already running.

Experience

Where I have worked.

Oct 2024 - Present
Unifonic · Pakistan, Saudi HQ
Lead DevOps Engineer, DevEx Team
Manage 6 DevOps engineers embedded across 12 product squads and own platform architecture for 400+ services on multi-cloud Kubernetes. Release engineering on GitHub Actions and Argo CD, Kyverno policy enforcement, FinOps with Karpenter, the AWS to OCI migration delivered end to end, disaster recovery now extending to GCP, full Istio ambient adoption in progress, and the MCP servers behind the team's AI tooling.
400+ services Team of 6 EKS, OKE Istio ambient MCP servers
Jan 2024 - Sep 2024
Small World Financial Services · Remote
Technology Architect
Directed a 15-person team across DevOps, security, networking, IT, development, and QA to deliver a modernization program that had been stalled for over 8 months. Rebuilt infrastructure on OpenStack, OpenShift, and RKE2 with disaster recovery designed in from the start. The role ended when the company ceased operations.
Team of 15 AWS, GCP OpenShift RKE2
Oct 2021 - Dec 2023
Technogenics / StrikeReady · Pakistan
Lead DevOps Engineer
Built the DevOps department from 3 engineers to 9, hiring and mentoring the team while owning infrastructure strategy for a SaaS security platform of 500+ microservices. Introduced DevSecOps across delivery and established the modular Terraform, Helm, and GitOps foundations that made infrastructure one of the platform's strongest areas.
500+ services Grew team 3 to 9 GCP, OCI Terraform SOC 2, ISO 27001
Dec 2020 - Sep 2021
PostEx · Pakistan
DevOps Engineer
Stabilized Jenkins and Docker pipelines and deployed PCI-DSS-oriented AWS infrastructure, supporting a $10M funding round. Built tooling to catch container failures early and surface rollback candidates faster.
AWS Jenkins PCI-DSS
Jun 2019 - Nov 2020
UDAV · Pakistan
Associate DevOps Engineer
Supported ELK logging, early Kubernetes setups, CI pipelines, and on-call incident response.
ELK Kubernetes On-call
BS Computer Science, COMSATS Lahore
Stack

What I work with.

Cloud and Kubernetes
AWS OCI GCP Azure EKS OKE OpenShift RKE2 Karpenter Kyverno
Delivery and platform
Argo CD Kargo Argo Rollouts Helm Backstage GitHub Actions Bitbucket Pipelines Terraform Ansible FinOps
Networking and mesh
Istio ambient Gateway API Cloudflare Tunnels IAM
Observability
Prometheus Grafana Loki Tempo OpenSearch SLOs
AI platform
MCP servers AI-assisted code review GPU and inference workloads
Security and compliance
Vault OKTA RBAC SOC 2 ISO 27001 PCI-DSS
Contact

Open to lead, architect, and senior platform roles.

If your team is modernizing cloud platforms, building an internal developer platform, or figuring out where AI actually fits in the toolchain, I would be glad to talk.

Based in Pakistan. Open to remote and relocation.

Email
wajih@syedwajih.com
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LinkedIn
syed-wajih
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Resume
Resume_Syed_Wajih.pdf
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