Serhii
Zolotov
7+ years building reliable cloud-native platforms, CI/CD systems, and DevOps standards across GCP, AWS, and Azure. I lead platform practice, automate operational toil, and help teams ship safely at scale.
Serhii Zolotov
Cloud Platform Lead · Staff DevOps Engineer @ Grid DynamicsUkraine · 7+ yrs · GCP / AWS / Azure · Kubernetes/GKE · SRE · Security operations
Serhii
Zolotov
Reliable cloud-native platforms, CI/CD systems, SRE practices, and DevOps standards across GCP, AWS & Azure — with security and operations designed in from the start.
I treat DevOps as a full lifecycle, not a hand-off between teams: infrastructure, CI/CD, GitOps delivery, observability, and security are designed together. My focus is to reduce toil, make the safe path easy, and give teams standards they can actually use.
GitOps as source of truth.
Declarative infrastructure is the single source of truth. Terraform, Helm and ArgoCD describe the system; the cluster reconciles to match. No snowflakes, no manual drift.
Automate repeated work.
If a human does it twice, it becomes a pipeline. Python, Bash, Go and Java turn repetitive ops into reliable, reviewable automation — so engineers spend time on the hard problems.
Build for calm operations.
Platforms should scale and self-heal before anyone is paged. Kubernetes, sane autoscaling, spot/standard tiering and migration strategies that keep production calm under load.
Observability from day one.
You can't operate what you can't see. Metrics, logs and dashboards — ELK, CloudWatch, Zabbix, Azure Monitor — wired in from day one, not bolted on after the incident.
Standards that scale teams.
The biggest leverage isn't a clever pipeline — it's a shared way of working. As Cloud Platform Lead I set DevOps standards, grow engineers, and align multiple platform, DevOps, SRE and support squads on consistent, repeatable practices. Good architecture is a team sport.
Staff DevOps Engineer · Specialization Lead
Staff engineer for a major retail e-commerce platform: operating Kubernetes/GKE on GCP, driving GitOps delivery, and leading DevOps, SRE, support, and development practice across multiple squads. Built a new platform function from the ground up and grew it to 25+ engineers.
- Delivered 15+ platform initiatives end-to-end; authored 3- and 6-month onboarding plans adopted across DevOps squads.
- Migrated deployments from Spinnaker to ArgoCD; introduced SLOs by metric priority — teams cut incident noise and responded faster to what mattered.
- Optimized GCP infrastructure in code — right-sized workloads, introduced zero-downtime maintenance where the architecture allowed it.
- Introduced AI-assisted engineering with GitLab Duo and Vertex AI, routing tasks by complexity to balance speed, cost, and quality.
- Owned platform security posture: shift-left scanning, secrets management, policy-as-code, and supply-chain hardening.
- Ran guilds, office hours, hiring loops, platform RFCs, runbooks, and a clear definition of done for platform changes.
Senior DevOps Engineer · Specialization Lead
Led migrations from on-prem into GCP with Terraform — Kubernetes, Artifactory, and delivery tooling — while standing up the standards that let three squads ship on one platform.
- Participated in on-prem → cloud migration; later owned the Spinnaker → ArgoCD transition for production deployments.
- On Jenkins, established the delivery flow and standards teams followed; after migration from self-managed GitLab to GitLab SaaS, introduced shared GitLab CI templates — deeper tool integration, stronger security, and higher reliability.
- Built cross-team workflow standards across three squads — not just process documentation, but the why behind each decision. Result: faster issue resolution and more delivery per cycle.
DevOps Engineer
Led the NOC team while keeping containerized delivery fast and reliable: owned CI/CD pipelines, hardened image build standards, authored Kubernetes runbooks, stood up ELK observability, and co-led migration from on-prem to GKE and VMs.
Strong Junior Systems Engineer
Owned monitoring and incident response for US-based projects across Azure and AWS.
- Built observability with Zabbix, CloudWatch/CloudTrail and Azure Monitor — plus a custom status page covering on-prem infrastructure.
- Built and hardened Stripe payment infrastructure, including webhook monitoring, integration improvements, and security-gap closure.
- Built Jenkins pipelines and ran the ELK stack (Logstash/Kibana) for log aggregation and alerting.
- On a separate on-prem project: stood up Azure DevOps Build/Release pipelines, Harbor registry, Ansible roles, Vault secrets, and certificate lifecycle for internal domains.
Junior Systems Engineer
Worked on bank-operations and security-improvement projects under NDA. Containerized workloads with Docker and Docker Compose; built and maintained delivery pipelines in GitLab CI, handled basic AWS operations, and improved deployment workflows with development and operations teams.
Junior Systems Engineer
Built CI/CD for an OpenShift platform and automated GCP security governance.
- Configured Jenkins CI/CD pipelines for OpenShift — SonarQube, Nexus and Gerrit integrated into the standard build.
- On a GCP security squad: automated infrastructure governance with cloud-custodian, Python and Google APIs — Terraform-provisioned resources with guardrails applied as code.
Cloud Platform on GCP
problem Three squads, fragmented delivery standards, and active migration risk on a retail-scale GCP estate.
approach Terraform platform, GitOps with ArgoCD, shared Helm patterns, SLOs by priority, GCP right-sizing.
outcome Unified delivery standards across multiple DevOps, SRE and support squads during a retail-scale GCP migration. Built Terraform and GitOps patterns with ArgoCD, improved SLO visibility, reduced deployment and incident noise, and optimized cloud capacity against real demand.
AI-Assisted Engineering Adoption
Introduced GitLab Duo and Vertex AI into engineering workflows with task-based routing, cost-aware usage, and governance so teams could use AI assistance without losing quality, security, or budget control.
Monitoring & Incident Platform
Built end-to-end monitoring for US projects spanning Azure and AWS — Zabbix, CloudWatch/CloudTrail and Azure Monitor — plus a custom status page for on-prem VMs and Stripe. Investigated and resolved incidents across a hybrid estate.
On-Prem Azure DevOps + Harbor
Stood up a fully on-prem delivery stack on a local Azure DevOps server: Build/Release pipelines, Harbor as the Docker registry, Ansible roles, HashiCorp Vault for credentials and access control, ELK for logs, and certificate management for domains.
GCP Policy-as-Code
Governed GCP infrastructure with cloud-custodian, Python and Google APIs — automated guardrails and Terraform-provisioned infrastructure, building security policy directly into the cloud estate as code.
I build platforms, but my real leverage is making teams faster, safer, and more consistent. I prefer boring, reversible decisions documented in RFCs over clever one-offs. I align squads by making the default path easy: shared CI templates, GitOps, observability, and security built into the platform from day one.
▸scale & reliability
- Migrated production deployments from Spinnaker to ArgoCD across the retail platform.
- Participated in on-prem → GCP migration; optimized infrastructure in code and reduced unnecessary workloads.
- Introduced zero-downtime maintenance patterns for services where the architecture supported it.
- Defined SLOs by metric priority — teams focused on the right tickets and incident load dropped.
▸leadership & mentoring
- Built a new platform function from the ground up and led 25+ engineers across multiple squads, with promotion readiness and technical growth as explicit goals.
- Authored 3- and 6-month onboarding plans with detailed curricula adopted across two DevOps squads.
- Ran guilds & office hours, review standards, hiring loops, platform RFCs, and internal runbooks.
- Set definition of done for platform changes so shipping stayed safe and reviewable.
▸standards that stuck
Built cross-team workflow standards so engineers understood why the process exists — not just which button to press. On Jenkins we defined the flow and standard the teams followed; after moving to GitLab SaaS, we migrated to GitLab CI and introduced shared pipeline templates — integrated with our toolchain, blending industry best practices with our own security and reliability ideas. Result: faster issue resolution and more delivery in the same cycle.
▸engagement
- Open to interesting Staff / Lead / Architect opportunities — remote, hybrid, or flexible arrangements.
- Based in Ukraine 🇺🇦 with EU timezone overlap; C1 English.
- Best fit: multi-team platform leadership — retail, regulated, or enterprise scale.
Team Leader of the Year
Recognized as Team Leader of the Year for driving strong operational results while building a collaborative, supportive culture — emphasizing people development, process improvement, and clear communication to keep the team resilient through change and high workload.
Team Leader of the Year
Awarded Team Leader of the Year for strong team performance in cloud platform delivery, improved incident response, and operational excellence — recognizing the collective effort of the whole team.