Andrey Gubarev

RU Citizen

Mtskheta St 17, Tbilisi, Georgia

Professional Experience

Director of Infrastructure at RebelMouse

Jan 2024 - Present | New York, US (Remote)

Led SOC 2 Type II compliance efforts, including defining scope, managing documentation, coordinating with stakeholders, resulting in successful certification.
Established the strategic vision and multi-year roadmap for infrastructure development, aligning with company objectives and focusing on scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
Architected and automated Disaster Recovery (DR) environments and plans for critical services, leveraging Terraform, Terragrunt, and Kubernetes for AWS infrastructure.
Led the definition and implementation of DevOps/SRE operational policies, role definitions, incident response protocols, and communication guidelines, establishing a structured knowledge base.
Developed and enhanced AWS cost allocation and cost reporting pipelines using Python (Pandas), ClickHouse, and YAML-based tagging, providing trend analysis and anomaly detection.
Spearheaded the buildout of a modern observability platform, integrating OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse and Grafana, for comprehensive logs, traces, metrics, and cost analysis.
Standardized infrastructure provisioning with modular Terraform/Terragrunt, SOPS/KMS for secrets, and direnv for environment consistency.
Managed key vendor relationships, including AWS and Fastly ensuring these partnerships supported technical and business objectives effectively.

Skills: Strategic Planning, Project Management, Team Management, Budget Management
Technologies: AWS, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as code (IaC), OpenTelemetry.

Head of DevOps at RebelMouse

Feb 2021 - Dec 2023 | New York, US (Remote)

Led the migration of core applications (Python/Django, Elixir) to Kubernetes (EKS) using Helm and ArgoCD, establishing GitOps workflows and significantly improving deployment velocity and reliability.
Drove the decomposition of a monolithic backend into specialized microservices, each with dedicated Helm charts, CI/CD pipelines, and ArgoCD applications, enhancing scalability and maintainability.
Architected and implemented advanced ingress and proxy layers using Nginx, HAProxy, and Istio, featuring sophisticated traffic routing (canary, mirroring, topology-aware).
Engineered and automated secrets management across the platform using SOPS with AWS KMS, integrating into CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes deployments.
Led multiple large-scale client website migrations, coordinating infrastructure, ingress, DNS, and application configuration for seamless cutovers.

Skills: Project Management, Team Management
Technologies: AWS, Kubernetes, Istio, CI/CD, Infrastructure as code (IaC), Python, OpenTelemetry, SOPS.

Lead DevOps Engineer at RebelMouse

Jan 2017 - Jan 2021 | New York, US (Remote)

Led the adoption and implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and Ansible, automating provisioning and configuration of AWS resources (EC2, ASG, VPC, ALB, RDS, S3, Route53).
Pioneered the company's migration to containerization and orchestration with Docker and early Kubernetes (EKS) adoption, establishing GitOps practices with ArgoCD and Kustomize.
Architected and deployed a centralized logging and monitoring stack (Fluentd, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana) providing comprehensive observability across services.
Engineered and managed advanced CDN configurations (Fastly, Cloudflare) with VCL/API for caching, security, and edge logic, including automated testing and purging systems.
Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines using TeamCity, automating builds, testing, and deployments for diverse workloads.
Automated system hardening, security agent deployment, and AWS WAF integration, significantly improving the platform's security posture.
Drove the migration of Terraform codebases to v0.12+ and introduced Terragrunt for enhanced state and dependency management, standardizing infrastructure templating with Cookiecutter.

Skills: Project Management
Technologies: AWS (EC2, EKS, S3, RDS, VPC, WAF), Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, Packer, Docker, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Istio, Fastly, Cloudflare, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Python, Bash, TeamCity.

Senior Software Engineer / DevOps Engineer at RebelMouse

Oct 2015 - Dec 2016 | New York, US (Remote)

Transitioned to a DevOps role, leading the design and automation of the company's cloud infrastructure on AWS.

Designed and implemented AWS cloud infrastructure as part of the DevOps transformation, building a serving and caching stack that enhanced platform reliability and security.
Engineered infrastructure-as-code solutions using Ansible and Packer for automated AMI building, server provisioning, and consistent application deployment across multiple environments, significantly reducing manual effort.
Established a centralized logging solution by implementing a Fluentd, Elasticsearch, and Kibana stack for logging and Sentry for error monitoring, improving issue detection, resolution speed, and system health visibility.
Integrating CI/CD tooling and DNS management to streamline code delivery, accelerate release cycles, and ensure deployment consistency.
Enhanced core Python services and performance by refactoring internal data libraries, launching versioned public APIs with robust test coverage.

Technologies: Python, Django, Ansible, Packer, Docker, AWS (EC2, S3, ELB), Nginx, OpenResty, Varnish, HAProxy, uWSGI, Sentry, MongoDB, Redis, REST APIs.

Software Engineer at RebelMouse

Nov 2012 - Sep 2015 | New York, US (Remote)

Worked as part of the team developing and scaling the core RebelMouse platform, contributing to backend systems, APIs, and performance optimizations.

Developed backend and frontend features (activity streams, APIs, settings engine, CTA, social integrations, content distribution features) for a high-traffic social content platform using Python/Django and JavaScript (Backbone.js, jQuery, RequireJS).
Focused on performance optimization through advanced caching strategies (Redis, Memcached), database query optimization, and asynchronous task processing (Celery).
Developed and integrated internal libraries (Python-based Redis/MongoDB extensions, templating, validation, content management) and integrated numerous third-party APIs (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, S3, SES).

Technologies: Python, Django, Celery, eventlet, Redis, Memcached, MongoDB, MySQL, Backbone.js, REST APIs, S3.

Software Engineer at CasaHop

Dec 2011 - Oct 2012 | New York, US (Remote)

Contributed to the backend and frontend development of a social travel platform, focusing on building performant backend features:

Developed features including Facebook authentication, photo uploads (S3, async processing), real-time notifications (WebSockets).
Implemented Redis-based autocomplete, activity feeds, and advanced caching mechanisms.
Migrated database from MySQL to PostgreSQL/PostGIS. Optimized database queries.
Automated development environment setup (Fabric, Makefile, Vagrant), and deployment to AWS/dotCloud.

Technologies: Python, Django, Celery, Redis, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Backbone.js, jQuery, HTML, SCSS, S3, Facebook API, Google Maps API, Fabric, Vagrant.

Education

Master's Degree (Specialist) in Information Security

South-West State University (formerly Kursk State Technical University), Kursk, Russia

2006 - 2011