Platform Engineer - Kensium · Chicago, IL
May 2023 - Present
AWS platform engineering, Kubernetes operations and production delivery.
- Own AWS and Kubernetes platform operations across eight Terraform-managed EKS clusters (4 production, 2 staging, 1 development, and 1 sandbox), maintaining runtime reliability for services backed by RDS PostgreSQL and ElastiCache Redis.
- Reduced compute costs by approximately $360,000 annually, based on team AWS billing results, by replacing Cluster Autoscaler with Karpenter and using Spot for eligible non-production workloads while retaining On-Demand for critical services. Reduced storage costs 20-30% with S3 lifecycle policies moving data to IA and Glacier tiers.
- Decoupled application delivery from infrastructure provisioning by replacing Terraform-driven releases with GitHub Actions and Argo CD, enabling developer self-service in lower environments while retaining CloudOps and SRE controls for production.
- Built durable order and inventory streaming between storefronts and ERP systems with Strimzi-managed Kafka in KRaft mode; added Kafka Exporter and Prometheus monitoring for visibility into streaming health.
- Migrated application traffic from ingress-nginx to Gateway API through parallel validation and incremental cutover, consolidating routing and TLS ownership while reducing dedicated load balancers and preserving availability.