Senior Cloud Engineer AWS IaC & Kubernetes

LUIS CASTILLO

SENIOR CLOUD ENGINEER

****************@*****.*** +52-564******* Texcoco, México

https://www.linkedin.com/in/luis-felipe-castillo-espejel/ SUMMARY

Experienced cloud engineer with a strong track record designing, automating, and operating secure, scalable AWS infrastructure for production services; experienced in IaC, CI/CD, containerization, monitoring, and cost/performance optimization across multi-account environments.

SKILLS

Cloud & Platforms: AWS, EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, Lambda, CloudFront, Route 53, EBS Infrastructure As Code & Automation: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, AWS CDK, Packer

Ci/cd & Devops: Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Git, GitHub Actions

Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, EKS, Helm, container registries Languages & Scripting: Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go, JSON, YAML Monitoring & Observability: CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Security & Compliance: IAM, KMS, Security Groups, NACLs, encryption at rest/in transit, vulnerability scanning

Databases & Storage: RDS (MySQL/Postgres), Aurora, DynamoDB, S3 lifecycle, backups, snapshot management

Cost & Performance: Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, autoscaling, right-sizing, caching Other Tools: Terraform Cloud/Enterprise, Vault, SSO, MFA, Slack, PagerDuty Expert in AWS core services (EC2, S3, RDS, VPC) and multi-account architecture, delivering highly available systems at scale.

Proficient with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CloudFormation, and configuration automation with Ansible, achieving repeatable, audited deployments. Hands-on with CI/CD pipelines and automation using Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, and scripting in Python and Bash to reduce manual effort and deployment risk. Skilled in containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes, implementing robust observability with CloudWatch and Datadog.

Strong focus on security and compliance: IAM least-privilege, encryption, network segmentation, and automated compliance monitoring.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

HQSoftware

Senior Cloud / AWS Engineer

Aug 2022 - Apr 2026

Architected and operated multi-account AWS environments (VPC, EC2, RDS, S3) supporting 30+ services and 200+ instances, improving availability to 99.99% through automated failover and multi-AZ deployments.

Led full IaC adoption using Terraform and modularized templates to provision networking, compute, and database layers, reducing environment provisioning time from days to under 45 minutes and enabling consistent reproducible stacks across dev/stage/prod. Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and AWS CodePipeline, integrating automated testing and blue/green deployments to increase release frequency from monthly to daily and reduce failed deploys by 78%.

Implemented security controls and governance: hardened IAM roles, enforced least-privilege, enabled KMS encryption for S3/EBS and automated snapshot rotation, leading to successful compliance audits with zero critical findings.

Built autoscaling strategies and cost controls (rightsizing, spot instances, Reserved Instance planning) that cut monthly cloud spend by 35% while preserving peak performance for user- facing APIs handling 3M+ requests/day.

Established monitoring and alerting with CloudWatch and Datadog, creating dashboards and SLO alerts that reduced mean time to detection (MTTD) by 60% and mean time to recovery

(MTTR) by 50% across production services.

Containerized legacy services with Docker and migrated stateless components to Kubernetes

(EKS), improving deployment consistency and reducing environment drift across teams. Authored operational runbooks and automated remediation scripts in Python and Bash to resolve common incidents, cutting manual on-call actions by 70% and enabling 24/7 automated recovery for key workflows.

Led a large-scale migration from on-prem virtualization to AWS for a 50TB dataset into S3 with lifecycle policies and cross-region replication, ensuring zero data loss and reducing storage TCO by 28%.

Collaborated with development teams to define platform APIs and native service patterns, integrating IAM, service roles, and secrets management to simplify secure access in CI/CD pipelines.

Introduced policy-as-code and pre-commit checks for Terraform to prevent drift and enforce tagging, resulting in 95% compliance for cost center tagging and easier chargeback reporting. Triage and resolved complex production incidents spanning networking, databases, and application layers, coordinating cross-functional teams and driving post-incident action plans that eliminated recurrence of top 3 incident types. Menlo Innovations

Cloud / DevOps Engineer

Aug 2019 - Jul 2022

DIXTRA

Cloud Engineer / Infrastructure Associate

Jun 2017 - May 2019

EDUCATION

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science

Bismarck State College Sep 2015 - May 2019

Designed and deployed production AWS architectures including VPC, EC2, RDS, and S3 for multiple customer-facing applications, supporting up to 120k daily active users with redundant, autoscaled services.

Developed Terraform modules and CloudFormation stacks to standardize environment creation and lifecycle management, cutting environment drift and provisioning errors by 85%. Built CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and Git-based workflows to automate build/test/deploy stages, reducing time-to-deploy from 6 hours to under 30 minutes for microservice releases. Implemented central logging and observability with CloudWatch and Datadog, adding SLA dashboards and alerting that reduced incident escalation by 40% and improved capacity planning.

Automated backup and disaster recovery procedures for databases and object storage with scheduled snapshots and cross-region replication, delivering RTO/RPO targets of under 2 hours for critical systems.

Containerized several backend services using Docker and created Helm charts to deploy to Kubernetes test clusters, shortening onboarding time for developers and standardizing CI artifacts.

Wrote automation scripts in Python and Bash for environment setup and data migration tasks, enabling repeatable test environments and accelerating feature QA cycles by 3x. Worked with security and QA teams to implement IAM best practices, secrets rotation, and vulnerability scanning in pipelines, reducing exposure and improving audit readiness. Supported and provisioned AWS resources ( EC2, S3, basic RDS) for development and staging environments, enabling 20+ engineering teams to iterate quickly with self-service stacks. Authored repeatable deployment scripts and lightweight CloudFormation templates to automate common environment builds, decreasing manual setup time by 90% for new projects. Maintained CI integrations and build jobs for automated testing using Jenkins and scripting in Bash, reducing build flakiness and speeding feedback to developers. Managed container images and basic Docker orchestration for development workflows, improving local parity and decreasing 'works on my machine' incidents. Handled routine monitoring and alerting using CloudWatch, responding to incidents and escalating when necessary to ensure service continuity for small-scale production systems. Assisted in implementing IAM policies and S3 lifecycle rules while supporting scheduled backups and snapshots to meet basic DR requirements and cost controls. Collaborated with senior engineers to migrate small services to cloud-first patterns and participated in postmortems that improved on-call runbooks and incident documentation. PROJECTS

Multi-Region High-Availability Platform (Ecommerce Backend) Led architecture and IaC (Terraform) implementation for a multi-region AWS platform with auto- scaling EC2, RDS replicas, and S3 replication, supporting 3M+ daily requests and delivering 99.99% uptime with cross-region failover and automated deployment pipelines. CI/CD Modernization & Release Automation

Built CI/CD flow using Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, and automated testing to enable blue/green deployments and automatic canary promotion, increasing deployment frequency from monthly to daily and reducing rollback rate by 78%. Infrastructure Cost Optimization Program

Executed rightsizing, Reserved Instance and Spot strategy, and storage lifecycle policies across accounts, reducing monthly AWS spend by 35% and improving cost visibility through tagging and Terraform state governance.

Kubernetes Migration for Stateless Services

Containerized legacy services with Docker, created Helm charts, and deployed to EKS with autoscaling and health checks, improving deployment consistency and developer productivity while lowering environment drift.

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