toptal.com
Contact us: +1.888.867.7001
Mihai Plesa, DevOps Engineer and Developer in George Town, Cayman Islands
Mihai Plesa

DevOps Engineer and Developer in George Town, Cayman Islands

Member since July 16, 2018
Mihai is a general IT specialist with 15+ years of experience, keen on having a meaningful impact at and outside the workplace. He's an agile practitioner, passionate about automation and optimization of processes in a holistic way. Mihail has worked with a wide set of projects and technologies around DevOps, including development and industries such as banking, finance, insurance, media, IoT, translation, privacy, security, and blockchain.
Mihai is now available for hire
Hire Mihai

Portfolio

Experience

Location

George Town, Cayman Islands

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

IDEA IDE, Visual Studio Code, MacOS, Windows, Linux

The most amazing...

...project I've worked on is the Brave browser, releasing it continuously to our millions of users.

Employment

  • Senior DevOps Director

    2018 - PRESENT
    Brave Browser and Basic Attention Token (BAT)
    • Led a team distributed on three continents specializing in scaling and delivering our browser, content creator rewards platform, and private ad ecosystem to millions of users.
    • Provided solutions at the intersection of large-scale crawling and scraping, machine learning, data pipelines, performance testing, privacy, and security.
    • Scaled our browser and services to over 60 million users a month.
    Technologies: Chromium, Heroku, Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Ansible, Terraform, C++, Node.js, Go, Python, CI/CD Pipelines, DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Groovy Scripting

  • Director

    2015 - PRESENT
    Here to Optimize
    • Provided DevOps and cloud consulting to clients in various industries.
    • Offered end-to-end digital transformation services.
    • Provided cultural coaching and a transformation for more agile delivery.
    Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Web Crawlers, Scraping, Chatbots, Terraform, Docker, Python, AWS, Linux, CI/CD Pipelines, DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Groovy Scripting

  • Solution Architect and Java Developer (Contract)

    2018 - 2018
    Policy Expert
    • Implemented a flexible monitoring solution for the AWS estate.
    • Researched and evaluated various monitoring solutions.
    • Applied various optimizations to reduce the cloud cost.
    Technologies: Micrometer, Datadog, Graphite, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Push Notification Service (AWS SNS), Amazon EC2, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, AWS SDK, Go, Python, Java 8, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Groovy Scripting

  • DevOps Consultant and Python Developer (Contract)

    2016 - 2018
    Barclays Investment
    • Provided consulting for bank-wide cloud migration together with AWS Professional Services consultants.
    • Designed and developed a cloud resource provisioning tool handling centralized setup, patching, upgrade, and teardown of thousands of AWS accounts.
    • Led greenfield implementation of a functional infrastructure testing framework that ensures role permissions and capabilities are propagated correctly according to the compliance and security model.
    • Set up continuous integration pipelines using Jenkins.
    • Facilitated a cultural transformation by improving processes and aided the transition from Waterfall to Agile methodologies.
    • Onboarded and mentored new and existing team members.
    Technologies: Boto 3, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), RPM, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), AWS ELB, AWS IAM, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS CloudTrail, AWS Push Notification Service (AWS SNS), Amazon SQS, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EC2, AWS Kinesis, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Consul, Vault, Terraform, Docker, OpenShift, Windows PowerShell, Python, Linux, Enterprise, RHEL, Windows, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Groovy Scripting

  • DevOps Systems Engineer (Contract)

    2016 - 2016
    Mergermarket Group
    • Containerized and converted various on-premises monoliths into microservices on AWS.
    • Managed and tuned Docker in production, implementing custom monitoring metrics.
    • Implemented serverless Amazon ECS autoscaling based on cluster resource utilization.
    • Led migration from internal Docker Registry to Amazon ECR.
    • Used Ansible for rolling out updates to servers in the datacenters and AWS.
    • Onboarded new colleagues and off-site team members.
    • Configured Jenkins and TeamCity for continuous integration.
    • Configured various policies in firewalls and proxies.
    • Reduced and optimized the cloud infrastructure bills.
    • Provided an on-call rotation and 24/7 production support.
    Technologies: MySQL, AWS SDK, AWS CLI, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Elastic File System, AWS Push Notification Service (AWS SNS), Amazon SQS, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), AWS IAM, Amazon Route 53, Packer, Vagrant, Terraform, Docker, Ansible, Node.js, Python, Bash Script, Ubuntu, CentOS, Linux, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Groovy Scripting

  • Senior Platform Engineer

    2014 - 2015
    AlertMe (British Gas Connected Homes)
    • Collaborated with the core team behind the largest Internet of things platform in the UK. The platform powers the Hive ecosystem of smart devices, with more than 200,000 users.
    • Optimized the continuous delivery pipeline, enabling faster shipping to production, from two or three months to one week.
    • Performed deployments and troubleshooting of multiple distributed components.
    • Implemented remote logging and monitoring for various components, drastically simplifying debugging and allowing complex analytics.
    • Introduced Ansible and used it to build an operational configuration management framework.
    • Participated in the third-line production support and on-call.
    • Contributed to various open-source projects on GitHub.
    Technologies: RabbitMQ, KairosDB, Cassandra, MySQL, AWS SDK, AWS CLI, AWS Push Notification Service (AWS SNS), Amazon SQS, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon EC2, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), VirtualBox, Vagrant, Packer, Puppet, Ansible, Java, Ruby, Bash Script, Debian, Ubuntu, Linux, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Groovy Scripting

  • Continuous Delivery Engineer

    2011 - 2014
    Language Weaver (SDL)
    • Owned continuous delivery, managing 120+ Jenkins projects and 40+ servers.
    • Automated and improved build, release, testing, and deployment processes, leading to faster feedback and validation (up to 20x) and shorter release cycles (several weeks instead of 3–6 months).
    • Designed and implemented configuration management and infrastructure monitoring solutions, which improved scalability and DevOps team productivity multiple times.
    • Implemented continuous integration best practices on in-house projects, having defined standards, optimized build processes, performed test automation, implemented one-click deployment and reporting, and ensured quality tracking.
    • Researched, benchmarked, and built proofs of concept on various technologies and tools.
    • Led the migration from legacy technologies: Subversion to Git and Ant to Maven.
    • Provided support to colleagues together with the DevOps team.
    • Mentored and coached interns and other staff members.
    Technologies: ActiveMQ, Apache Tomcat, HTTPD, WebDriver, Selenium, Apache JMeter, Cucumber, JUnit, TestNG, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Perl, Ruby, PHP, REST, Grails, Spring, Ansible, Sonar, Nexus, Maven, Ant, Hudson, Jenkins, Groovy, Java, Bash Script, Red Hat Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Linux, CI/CD Pipelines, DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Groovy Scripting

  • Software Development Engineer in Test

    2008 - 2011
    Audicon
    • Developed a test manager and runner for black box API testing and raised code coverage to 80%.
    • Implemented a flexible data generator for testing.
    • Developed a tool for test data randomization and stochastic testing.
    • Created an auto-deploying tool pack enabling configuration management on tens of test servers.
    • Developed a web application and related scripts for collecting status and information about servers.
    • Set up network monitoring with SMS alerts and automatic server shutdown in case of power outage.
    • Implemented a solution for employee paperwork automation, reports, and invoice management.
    • Defined storage, virtualization, and IT acquisition strategy along with managers.
    Technologies: VirtualBox, VMware ESXi, Citrix, Hyper-V, Azure Active Directory, Windows Server, Red Hat Linux, CentOS, Linux, Microsoft Office SDK, VBScript, Windows PowerShell, MSBuild, Visual Studio, TFS, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, ASP.NET, .NET, C#, CI/CD Pipelines, DevOps, Jenkins Pipeline, Ant

Experience

  • LinkedIn Scraping Bot
    https://github.com/mihaiplesa/linkedin-scraping-bot-python

    This is a personal project written in Python for scraping LinkedIn.

    It logs in an account, finds and visits profiles based on keywords, and extracts data from them.

    I led the design and implementation.

  • Instagram Bot
    https://github.com/mihaiplesa/instagram-bot-python

    This is a personal project written in Python for gaining Instagram followers.

    It logs into an account, finds and visits profiles based on hashtags, follows them, and likes their photos.

    I led the design and implementation.

  • AWS ECS Fargate Sample Architecture with Terraform
    https://github.com/mihaiplesa/terraform-aws-ecs-fargate

    Personal project to illustrate the use of various technologies like Terraform, AWS ECS, ECR, Fargate, ALB, ACM, Route 53, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy, and best practices.

    I led the architecture, design, and implementation.

Skills

  • Languages

    Bash, Python, Gherkin, Python 2, Python 3, Bash Script, JavaScript, Java, Groovy, Ruby, HTML, Java 8, VBScript, C#, Perl, PHP, CSS, Go, C++, C

  • Frameworks

    Angular, Selenium, Spring, TestNG, JUnit, Nose, Windows PowerShell, AWS HA, ASP.NET, .NET, Grails, Ruby on Rails (RoR)

  • Libraries/APIs

    WebDriver, Selenium WebDriver, Jenkins Pipeline, Jenkins Job DSL, GitHub API, Carbon, Selenium Grid, Node.js, AMQP

  • Tools

    Git, Shell, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CLI, AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service), Amazon EBS, Amazon ECR (Amazon Elastic Container Registry), Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon SQS, AWS Push Notification Service (AWS SNS), AWS ELB, AWS IAM, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Artifactory, Sonar, SonarQube, TeamCity, Behave, Cucumber, Boto, Boto 3, Docker Compose, VirtualBox, Subversion (SVN), Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, AWS SDK, Puppet, Chef, GitHub, GitLab, RabbitMQ, ELK (Elastic Stack), Graylog, Nagios, Fastly, Logstash, Apache Tomcat, NGINX, Maven, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Kibana, Grafana, Make, Pytest, Zabbix, RPM, Microsoft Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Sentry, Vagrant, Packer, Gradle, Travis CI, Amazon EKS, AWS CloudFormation, MongoDB Atlas, Google Compute Engine (GCE), IDEA IDE, AWS CloudTrail, Hudson, Visual Studio, Hyper-V, MSBuild, TFS, SaltStack, ActiveMQ, Apache JMeter, Solr, Vault, Apache ZooKeeper, Bazel

  • Paradigms

    Serverless Architecture, Microservices, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), DevOps, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Test-driven Development (TDD), REST, Data Science

  • Platforms

    Docker, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, Amazon EC2, Windows, Azure, PagerDuty, New Relic, CentOS, Fedora, Linux RHEL/CentOS, Red Hat Linux, Debian, Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Heroku, MacOS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Visual Studio Code, AWS Kinesis, Windows Server, Citrix, Nexus, OpenShift, Kali Linux, Kubernetes

  • Storage

    Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon EFS, Datadog, Google Cloud, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, Memcached, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Elastic File System, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Active Directory, Hazelcast, KairosDB, Cassandra, Couchbase, CouchDB, RethinkDB, Amazon Aurora

  • Other

    Lambda Functions, AWS CodePipeline, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Shell Scripting, Serverless, System Administration, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Certified Developer, AWS Certified Solution Architect, AWS Certified SysOps Aministrator, AWS, Cloud, AWS DevOps, IT Infrastructure, CI/CD Pipelines, Ant, RHEL, Consul, SSL, HTTPS, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Graphite, Netflix OSS, Oracle VM VirtualBox, HAProxy, Ubuntu Server, IIS, Cloudflare, Chromium, Browsers, APM, Scraping, Large-scale Web Crawlers, Web Crawlers, Web Scraping, Groovy Scripting, Enterprise, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Amazon Route 53, Chatbots, HTTPD, Microsoft Office SDK, VMware ESXi, Micrometer, LDAP, Apache Cassandra, Octopus Deploy

Education

  • Master of Science in Computer Networks and Distributed Systems
    2010 - 2012
    Technical University of Cluj-Napoca - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
  • Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
    2006 - 2010
    Technical University of Cluj-Napoca - Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Certifications

  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
    APRIL 2018 - PRESENT
    AWS
  • AWS Certified Developer
    APRIL 2018 - PRESENT
    AWS
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect
    APRIL 2018 - PRESENT
    AWS
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
    FEBRUARY 2018 - PRESENT
    AWS
  • Online Marketing Academy Graduate
    OCTOBER 2013 - PRESENT
    Google
  • Microsoft Data Platform Competency (Sales, Marketing, Licensing)
    SEPTEMBER 2010 - PRESENT
    Microsoft

To view more profiles

Join Toptal
Share it with others
Hire the top 3% of freelance developers TM